Through the Children's Gate Read online

  It occurred to me, going home—taxicab responses, the New York version of the esprit d'escalier—that the city men, the firemen and policemen and city workers, live in concentric circles of culture, too. The simple, unimaginable bravery—going up the stairs toward the fire while everyone else was going down, away—was possible only because of the other firemen, who could not be let down, and then the brothers and fathers and sisters who shared their job and expected them to do this and would have been let down if they hadn't, and then the still wider circle of New York working-class culture, with its odd combination of skepticism and solidarity, on and on, circles saying, in this case, Yeah, we do this. It was a moment of self-definition: a true hero doesn't want to be one, he just is one. Their culture turned out to be far stronger than anyone would have known or guessed.

  All the little rituals of New York are enacted more mindfully now: from the breakfast special in a coffee shop to pizza on Saturday night to the way people never know how to pay when they get on a bus to the way they pull out tables in their living rooms to dine. I've always liked Howells's comparison of New York and Venice but thought it a sport, a conceit. Now it seems suddenly real: It's amazing, this city as dense as that city is wet, and you can imagine it engulfed by water.

  We try to control the uncontrollable through small acts of organization and domestic continuity. We have dinner every Saturday night with friends, the M's, as reliably as any family might have had dinner in Winesburg, Ohio, a standing date for a covered-dish supper. All across the city one hears about such retreats, though one also hears, enviously, that among the preparental group, it takes the form of passionate, unimpeded coupling, “terror sex,” sex made more exciting by fear. The child-laden instead have terror dining. Perhaps there is a lucky couple somewhere having both, terror sex with terror dining afterward; we make do, as our class cohort always has, with food alone.

  But what do you tell the children, what do you do with the children, what do you do for them? Do you level with them, protect them, or engage them? Our dear Deb K. decided to act. She took Luke's friend Jacob to Pakistan to deliver in person the money that their class had collected on behalf of Afghan refugee children. Admirable courage and proper aplomb. But we refused to send Luke along—Martha won't let him cross the street alone, much less send him halfway around the world on a mission of emergency relief. And there are parents who want … nothing, no news, no fright, only insulation and postponement. There was a prayer meeting, though not called so, in the church around the corner, where the firemen paraded down to a standing ovation from the children and the parents. The firemen looked embarrassed, but the children seemed glad to have someone to applaud.

  In the end, the children figure it out for themselves. They find their own models and formulate their own hypotheses, theories of the immediate world that might explain the larger and perplexing one outside. They are mindful but not careworn. After the towers fell, for instance, Luke became absorbed in playing chess, and then he became a Yankees fan, and I watched him use both these things, in different ways, to steady himself, to seek and grope and understand, and even to steady us.

  How much he grasped, how much he knew, I couldn't be sure. Did he play chess in “reaction”? I don't know. He is a seven-year-old boy in a school where chess has a large, perhaps overlarge, place; but I do know that he was frightened, a little, and was glad to have a game, to have anything, that he could control. We had, in the end, tried, as every parent did, to soft-pedal the disaster without sweet-talking it; to let him know what had happened without letting him see too clearly the unthinkable abyss of malice and nihilistic hatred that could produce it; to let him know that something terrible had happened in the city without making him think that something terrifying had permanently entered his world. We tried to conceal from him our fears, so different from our anxieties, which, like any child, he has long ago learned to notice and discount. (Children don't mind if their parents are worried; they expect it—parents are there to worry. But they notice at once if their parents are afraid, for that is what parents are never to be.)

  Luke looks soberly at us, as all children do now, in part for reassurance: “Like, if there's a war, they have no chance, right? Our army is much bigger than their army?” “Well, they don't really have an army,” the father begins, before recalling that what is wanted here is reassurance, not a page on asymmetrical warfare from Foreign Affairs. Dr. Spock, not Tom Friedman.

  So: “Whatever happens, it will all happen far away from here.” “How do you know?” “Well, because we're going over there to try and get the bad guys.” “Why are we going over there?” “Because that's where they bad guys are.” “Well, didn't the bad guys come here?” Well, they did. But the father says only, “We're going to go over there and stop them from being dangerous.” “You mean they'll have the war there?”“Yeah. I mean, obviously.” “Oh,” he says, greatly relieved, “I thought it was, like, they would choose where to have the war.”

  And I realize that he knows both far more than I imagine and far less than I realize. He thinks it is a tournament, like a baseball play-off, home and home series. (And, terrifying fact, this may not be so far from the terrible truth; it is home and away games.) As he presses the questions, harder and harder, the father is left, finally, with the one-size-fits-all parental explanation: “Don't worry. I know I'm right about this. You just have to trust me.”

  * * *

  Just trust me! Half the time, more than that, as a parent, at the end of long, rational argument, you end up saying, “It's okay. Just trust me.” Are we safe? Yes. Just trust me. Is there a wolf in the closet? There isn't. How do you know? I know. Trust me. Are there tsunamis in New York? Not really. How do you know. Well … (long explanation of wind currents and weather patterns, at least half of which the parent knows he's getting wrong). But that doesn't mean there could neverbe a tsunami? No, it doesn't. But there won't be. Just trust me.

  “Just trust me” means, first of all, You don't have to worry about this—I know. Or, we shouldn't argue about this—I know. But it means more, too; it means not just, I know more, but I've lived longer, and, most of all, it means something vaguely Dumbledoreish: I can see a small way into the future. It really means not, I know … but chances are. It is a short-term guess disguised as a long-term certainty.

  And to some degree a parent can see into the future better than a child, although the future the parent can see into isn't often more than a week further: I really do know that there are no monsters in that closet, I really do know that there is morning coming, I really do know that no one has died of a toxic yo-yo and that your mother's back won't break if you step on a crack. But though the parent's guesses about the world and its regularities are reasonably good, pretty solid, and a bit more mature than the child's, the truth is that violence and madness can alter everything and everyone, that the complicated structure of trust on which the liberal city depends—all those cars I wondered at just last year, waiting patiently at the intersection for the tiny light to change color—can be violated in the morning. Trust me, the big universal statement, is really a short-term statement, hoping to pass as something larger. I know there is no monster in that closet has to be expressed as I know there are no monsters. But what if there are?

  One part of the parent thinks, Well, I'll level with the child, give him a sense of the landscape of probabilities and odds that are out there governing his anxieties. And the other part thinks, no, the question, after all, isn't What are the odds? but Are you looking out for me? Not, Are there hidden reefs in this river? but, Are you a reliable pilot in the bridge? And the degree to which you know that you are not reliable—that it is a long confusing river, and the night is dark, and who knows how the hidden landscape has changed overnight—is not something that you can talk about. The children don't trust in your knowledge; they trust in you, because, basically, they have to trust in someone. It is not a calculation, but a variant of Pascal's gamble: I better believe in God, beca
use I have nothing to lose if he doesn't exist, and imagine the advantages if he does! The child reasons, If I accept that Dad knows what he's talking about, at least I'll feel safer, for now. What Pascal doesn't say is how God feels about the gambler, which is partly gratitude, and partly love, but also something close to panic. Hey, don't ask me how this universe runs, pal. I'm a stranger here myself. It explains why Dumbledore is so sloppy. Just trust me means not I know but I'm trying.

  The impulse within a broken world is to build a small safe place. Chess and chess tournaments offered this, and then, oddly, so did the Yankees. I think Luke would have liked chess in any case, but after the towers chess gave him what everyone has been looking for: a subculture entirely normal and predictable, a round of places to go to, a clean, clear series of wins and losses.

  The impulse—to lose yourself in a dependable routine when your world is in many ways fractured and upturned—is common. You could choose eating or sleeping or polemicizing about Islam, or you could choose to learn how to play chess. There are said to be three centers of chess excellence in the city: the private schools, like Artists & Anglers; the Russians in Brighton Beach; and everywhere the Koreans. We saw mostly the upper-crust chess players, and I can't say that they—that we—were an entirely attractive bunch. There was that wise-guy sense of being at the center of the universe, here tied to a cheap kind of expertise. The sensitivity in the eyes of French children is tied to their oppression: The world presents difficulties and problems, ineradicable and near impossible to beat. The French child plays chess every day with an implacable opponent, the School; New York kids play chess when they are playing chess, and the rest of the time they play a game called Your Life, where any move is legal and all gambits earn applause. There is something limiting and civilizing about chess. It opens up into a world of lore and pleasure, it closes down into a business of memorizing openings, and it is decorated by nerdy seven-year-olds working chess computers and looking puzzled. I hope it is only a phase for Luke, but I think it is a good phase.

  I am invested in his chess playing. Fiercely competitive myself, I must physically hold back my desire for him to win, my moment's disappointment when he doesn't. He manages it much better than I do. It's been a good experience for both of us, and when he brought home his first trophy—second place! second, but still an accomplishment, three games out of four won—it was a fine moment for all of us. I like his chess teacher, an Eastern European who wears a tie and a wool suit in every circumstance and weather and hisses out his instructions and plans. I have always been terrible at chess, too impatient and too restless and too blind to the future right around the corner. Luke has whatever the skill or knack is for being good at the game: seeing ahead, planning for the future. When I try to play with him, it becomes obvious that I'm not good enough.

  But I also see that being good at chess depends not on a wide-ranging but on a close-observing intelligence. I had imagined the chess prodigy as someone who could see far into the strategic future, all the right moves, but that turned out not to be it. The kids who are really good at chess—much better than Luke—see less, in a sense, than normal kids, but they see what they need to see: not some vast series of possible moves but the immediate and short-term encirclements, the four-turns-ahead effect of one move, which will lead to the forced series of moves that might end with a mate. The trick is to see not twelve moves ahead but four forced moves ahead. I go here, he has to go there, and then I go here, and he has to go here.… It is short-term thinking with a dagger in hand.

  I suppose that as they get better, the sequence of forced moves gets longer, but the essential point, I sense, is always tactical, not strategic: From the overwhelming universe of possible moves, you choose one line and follow it. Half the game is sizing up your opponent to see whether he already knows the line or will fall for it, like a seducer sizing up a maiden: Has she heard this song before? The innocent moment before the game, when the children shake hands and we beam on them and they pretend to wish their opponents good luck, is, I realize now, the killer moment, the moment when they take each other's measure, reading all the thousand small and nameless clues that faces and fingers provide, and decide: Yeah, I got him. This he won't have seen before.

  Last Sunday we went to one of the tournaments—the tough one. Luke came back. “I won,” he said. He had launched his favorite attack with his bishop and queen, a line that, if you haven't seen it before, is devastating and can even produce a four-move mate. Even if you have seen it before but don't remember precisely the right sequence of defense, it can ruin you; I bear the scars. If you are prepared for it, though, it is trivially easy to defend and leaves the attacker vulnerable, his queen out there exposed like a playmate. Luke next played a slow girl who was taking everything down in proper notation. I settled him in his chair, and, after a long game, he lost. “Girls with notebooks are risky,” he said, truer words never having been spoken.

  I conscientiously say, “Don't do it if you don't want to,” and offer lots of outdoors alternatives, but he always chooses chess. The chess teachers occasionally remind themselves to Generalize About the Benefits of the Game. They say that it is a preparation for life. But in fact, it is a preparation for life only because it involves a comforting illusion. Life is like chess only because in life, too, you seize on a short-term tactic, stick to it, and call it wisdom, until it stops working and you have to learn another.

  The two people—the only two people—I know who are not scrambled and shaken by what has happened are Kirk Varnedoe and our neighbor Sally. Both are acutely aware of absurdity and therefore all but imperturbable. Kirk faces the absurdity of illness, while Sally takes as her subject the absurdity of life. They are aligned in this awareness, and aligned as well in the odd, subdued stream of courage their knowledge provides.

  Kirk is dying, and this colors his view. Fools that we are, at the end of that happy summer, on a Monday night we went to celebrate his fifth year of being cancer-free, a fine dinner with Volnay and talk about life and art. That very Friday—that very Friday; how crazy we were to tempt the demons—he called, his voice shaky.

  “How are you?” I tried to boom, expecting, as I'd heard so often in twenty years, his happy, confident booming back.

  “Not so well, it seems,” he said, calmly but quietly, fear just audible as a tremor beneath the pauses between words. He explained that they had found a shadow on his chest, something that hadn't been there before. We went to the hospital along with Elyn, his wife, and the thoracic surgeon showed us the X-ray and said, “Look, I think it's probably cancer, colon cancer that's spread from the original site, and since it's lining the pneuma, I can't get it out. I'll go in and look, but I suspect that's what it is. I'm sorry.”

  “This is devastating news,” Kirk said simply. They had gone in, and sure enough, that's what it was, colon cancer in the lung, incurable and inoperable. “But treatable,” Kirk said positively. “They say it's treatable. Like a great tree with a root system that's been in my body all this time and is now suddenly coming into leaf.” A strong image, his own.

  We were supposed to have lunch on September n, but we didn't; they canceled his chemo. But it is Kirk who, looking death right in the face, is filled with confident indignation. “How can they pull this crap?” he says, meaning the cold exploitation of fear. “I'm supposed to put myself in a state of permanent panic and accede to anything these bastards say? Where's the confident spirit? Where's the American spirit—you know, Ed Harris in Apollo y.” He does a quick impression: “ ‘Let's … work … the … problem, let's not make things worse by running around in hysterics.’ All these guys do is work the hysteria.” There is an injury, he insists, real but limited, and an imagery, which, placed on a perpetual loop, can never be escaped. “The thing to do is not to give way to fear in a way that reduces the possibilities of life.”

  Of course he knows, and I do, too, that he has internalized the historical circumstances to the personal fact. Calculating odds, wor
king the problem, is all that stands between him and despair. “Those were my two lungs up there,” he says grimly, and I know what he means, and that his two lungs will not stand long, either.

  He is unrattled, though, and has been from the first day. “Don't tell me about God saving America, because God saving somebody was what those guys in the planes were all about,” he said in the interview we did when, after he got the news, he decided to leave the museum and go to Princeton to get a couple of years of coherent intellectual work done. He has the courage and the heedlessness of someone who can speak without fear because he is not afraid of saying things; saying the wrong thing is the least of his fears. We went, the six of us, to see the Richard Serra pieces in Chelsea, and the children ran through them, and he admired them, and we took common pleasure in the tangible, the necessary, the real—in things that kids can run around and art historians can debate. “I refute it thus,” Dr. Johnson said, kicking his stone in empirical defiance of Bishop Berkeley's idealism. We refute it—the horror—thus, by kicking a big torqued ellipsis around in our heads, and with our eyes, and then going to lunch to debate it.

  People who look mortality in the face every day have kinds of wisdom that may be acquired, even by those of us who try never to look it in the face until we have to.

  Sally, on the other hand, seems unrattled because it is hard to rattle her about anything. She has a different spiritual gift, less noble, perhaps, than that of a wise man facing death, but just as real: She has the steady optimism that comes of a pervasive, cheerful cynicism about life and human motive. When the panicky conversations about leaving and moving and running away begin, Sally simply sits at the dinner table, never eating—perpetually, metaphysically dieting, she never does, we used to send the children upstairs with waffles only to find that it made her squirm—just looking on, puzzled. The look on her face when people talk this talk isn't disagreement, and it is certainly not denial; it's a kind of amusement, a wit that is the elegance of realism. For Kirk, future certainty has become absurd; for Sally, future certainty is obviously absurd, so why pretend that it isn't? You're not leaving New York; it's too much work. You're not joining the army, because you can't. You're not actually going to do anything. So what do hysteria and fear get you except the indulgence of hysteria and fear? The dying and the sardonic, comedians and cancer patients, have the gift of four-move thinking: Bad things will happen that you can't imagine, but some good things will surprise you, too. You don't know what's going to happen. Could be worse—it often is. Could be better—it often is, too. Don't think ahead of the game. Compulsively imagining what might happen, instead of observing what does, is an insult to reality, and it takes your mental pieces right off the board.