Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

I doubt I put it as fancily as that, but I did say that Thelma Corbitt was the kind of woman whose private suffering had become a conduit for other people’s. And I didn’t regale your parents with the whole phone call of course, but the full conversation did come flooding back to me: Thelma immediately admiring the “courage” it must have taken for me to pick up the phone, inviting me right away to Denny’s funeral, but only if it wasn’t too painful for me to go. I allowed to Thelma that it might help me to express my own sorrow for her son’s passing, and for once I realized that I wasn’t simply going through the motions, saying what I was supposed to. Apropos of not much, Thelma explained that Denny had been named after the chain restaurant where she and her husband had their first date. I almost stopped her from going on because it seemed easier for me to know as little as possible about her boy, but she clearly believed that we would both be better off if I knew just who my son had murdered. She said Denny had been rehearsing for the school’s spring play, Woody Allen’s Don’t Drink the Water, and she’d been helping him with his lines. “He had us in stitches,” she offered. I said that I’d seen him in Streetcar the year before and that (stretching the truth) he’d been terrific. She seemed so pleased, if only that her boy wasn’t just a statistic to me, a name in the newspaper, or a torture. Then she said she wondered whether I didn’t have it harder than any of them. I backed off. I said, that couldn’t be fair; after all, at least I still had my son, and the next thing she said impressed me. She said, “Do you? Do you really?” I didn’t answer that, but thanked her for her kindness, and then we both got lost in such a tumble of mutual gratitude—an almost impersonal gratitude, that everyone in the world wasn’t simply horrid—that we both began to cry.

So, as I told your parents, I went to Denny’s funeral. I sat in the back. I wore black, though in funerals these days that is old-fashioned. And then in the receiving line to convey my condolences, I offered Thelma my hand and said, “I’m so sorry for my loss.” That’s what I said, a miscue, a gaffe, but I thought it would be worse to correct myself—“ your loss, I mean.” To your parents, I was blithering. They stared.

Finally I took refuge in logistics. The legal system is itself a machine, and I could describe its workings, as your father had once explained to me, with poetic lucidity, the workings of a catalytic converter. I said that Kevin had been arraigned and was being held without bail, and I was hopeful that the terminology, so familiar from TV, would comfort; it failed to. (How vital, the hard glass interface of that screen. Viewers don’t want those shows spilling willy-nilly into their homes, any more than they want other people’s sewage to overflow from their toilets.) I said I’d hired the best lawyer I could find—meaning, of course, the most expensive. I thought your father would approve; he himself always bought top-shelf. I was mistaken.

He intruded dully, “What for?”

I had never heard him ask that question of anything in his life. I admired the leap. You and I had always pilloried them behind their backs as being spiritually arid.

“I’m not sure, though it seemed expected… To get Kevin off as lightly as possible, I guess.” I frowned.

“Is that what you want?” asked your mother.

“No… What I want is to turn back the clock. What I want is to never have been born myself, if that’s what it took. I can’t have what I want.”

“But would you like to see him punished?” your father pressed. Mind, he didn’t sound wrathful; he hadn’t the energy.

I’m afraid I laughed. Just a dejected huh! Still, it wasn’t appropriate. “I’m sorry,” I explained. “But good luck to them. I tried for the better part of sixteen years to punish Kevin. Nothing I took away mattered to him in the first place. What’s the New York state juvenile justice system going to do? Send him to his room? I tried that. He didn’t have much use for anything outside his room, or in it; what’s the difference? And they’re hardly going to shame him. You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”

“He could at least be kept from hurting anyone else,” your father submitted.

A defective product is recalled, and withdrawn from the market. I said defiantly, “Well, there is a campaign on, to try him as an adult and give him the death penalty.”

“How do you feel about that?” asked your mother. Good grief, your parents had asked me if Wing and a Prayer would ever go public; they had asked if I thought those steam gadgets pressed trousers as well as ironing. They had never asked what I felt .

“Kevin is no adult. But will he be any different when he is one?” (They may be technically different specialties, but Workplace Massacre is really just School Shooting Grows Up.) “Honestly, there are some days,” I looked balefully out their bay window, “I wish they would give him the death penalty. Get it all over with. But that might be letting myself off the hook.”

“Surely you don’t blame yourself, my dear!” your mother chimed, though with a nervousness; if I did, she didn’t want to hear about it.

“I never liked him very much, Gladys.” I met her eyes squarely, mother-to-mother. “I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don’t always like you.’ But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, ‘I’m not oblivious to you—that is, you can still hurt my feelings—but I can’t stand having you around.’ Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, ‘I like you.’ I wonder if just enjoying your kid’s company isn’t more important.”

I had embarrassed them. Moreover, I’d done precisely what Harvey had already warned me against. Later they were both deposed, and snippets of this deadly little speech would be quoted back verbatim. I don’t think your parents had it in for me, but they were honest New Englanders, and I’d given them no reason to protect me. I guess I didn’t want them to.

When I rustled with leave-taking motions, setting down my stonecold tea, the two of them looked relieved yet frantic, locking eyes. They must have recognized that these cozy teatime chats of ours would prove limited in number, and maybe late at night, unable to sleep, they’d think of questions they might have asked. They were cordial, of course, inviting me to visit any time. Your mother assured me that, despite everything, they still considered me part of the family . Their inclusivity seemed less kind than it might have six weeks before. At that time, the prospect of being enveloped into any family had all the appeal of getting stuck in an elevator between floors.

“One last thing.” Your father touched my arm at the door, and once again asked the kind of question he’d evaded most of his life. “Do you understand why ?”

I fear my response will only have helped to cure him of such inquiries, for the answers are often so unsatisfying.

Dear Franklin,

The Electoral College just certified a Republican president, and you must be pleased. But despite your pose as a sexist, flag-waving retrograde, in fatherhood you were a good little liberal, as fastidious about corporal punishment and nonviolent toys as the times demanded. I’m not making fun, only wondering if you, too, go back over those precautions and ponder where we went wrong.