Amity Gaige - Schroder

“Here’s what I hear you saying,” said Thron after listening to my sad tale. “I hear you saying that you love your daughter. I hear you saying that you were a coequal parent, if not a genuine Mr. Mom, before the separation. I mean you were, in fact, a stay-at-home dad for a year — the primary caretaker — when your daughter was three. Am I hearing that correctly?”

“Yes, you are,” I said.

“And I hear you saying that in a gesture of goodwill toward your estranged wife, you got your nuts crunched in mediation, and now you’re left with this sense that — the sense that you feel—”

“Spiritually squandered,” I said. “Without meaning. Void.”

“Bad,” said Thron. “You feel really bad. Your feeling bad is made more bad by the sense that you — out of the goodness of your heart — forfeited your paternal rights — out of — of—”

“Love,” I said.

“Love.” Thron sat back. “Right.”

“I still love my wife,” I said. “My estranged wife.”

Thron, a broad-shouldered man whose generic office lacked a single plant or photograph, made an axing motion with his arm. “Forget. About. That. Your estranged wife does not love you. Someone who is trying to estrange you from her and from your child does not love you. Don’t be like the battered wife, Eric, stabbed fifty-seven times by her own husband. How does a person hang around long enough to get stabbed fifty-seven times by somebody? Because they’re still waiting around for love . Don’t get distracted, Eric. Don’t let your estranged wife stab you fifty-seven times. She stabs you once, that’s it. You stab right back.”

“OK,” I said.

“Do you know, Eric, that spouses who initiate divorce often think of the divorce as a ‘growth experience’? They even show better immune function. But you — the spouse who stuck around, the loyal one, the one who meant his vows — what do you get? You get left holding the bag. Your divorce could make you sick.”

“It has!” I cried. “I’ve had bronchitis for months.”

“If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times, Eric. You should have come to see me a long time ago.” Pertly, Thron stacked some papers. “Now, who filed the petition?”

“Petition?”

“The petition for divorce.”

“We haven’t filed. It’s — we’re separated. It’s a trial separation.”

“Then we’re filing today.” Thron licked his thumb and peeled a form off a thick pad. “We’re going to file today, so we can start litigation. You can’t litigate with no divorce. Otherwise, it’s just a friendly disagreement. And you tried that already, right? You need to sue.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can. File first, Eric. Be the plaintiff. Don’t be the defendant. Don’t spend your life counterpunching.”

“I need a day,” I said.

“One day. One day. Tomorrow you come in and file. Then ASAP we’ll also file a petition in family court for a modification of the custody agreement. If your estranged wife does not agree to it, bam —we go to court.”

“OK,” I said.

“We’re also going to hire — granted, at some expense — a topflight, independent child custody evaluator. This individual will observe you alone, and also you with your daughter — you know, playing checkers, sharing a soda — and he or she will write what I’m sure will be an A-plus report on your skills as a father. This report will be on file to aid the judge’s decision should we go to trial. OK?”

“OK.”

“Because you know what, Eric? You are a good father.”

“Thank you.”

“I can tell you are a good father. I can see it in your eyes.”

They could not help it; those eyes filled with tears. My heart let its ragged doves to the sky. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted someone to say just that to me. You are a good father . I was sweating everywhere, my underarms, my forehead, my back, secretions that seemed born of relief.

At the same time, a different voice inside me said, Don’t. Don’t do this. Trottel. Idiot. Don’t you know a thing ?

“Now, Eric,” said Thron. “Let’s go over some basic information. Let’s start with your date of birth.”

“March 12, 1970.”

“Place of birth?”

I looked out Thron’s window. The clouds were easing down the Hudson, as they often did in the afternoons, leaving the sun canting down into the valley in shattered-looking rays.

I came very close to telling Thron the truth in that moment. I am not who I say I am , I almost said. When I was five, I crossed the East German border holding nothing but my father’s hand (I almost said). I spent my shitty adolescence in an immigrants’ ghetto in Dorchester, Mass. And that’s just the beginning (I almost said).

Out Thron’s window, between the buildings on Quackenbush, I stared at the Hudson. How pitiable is a river. Nothing belongs to it, neither its water nor its sediment. This will never be over, I reminded myself. You created it to have no end.

“I was born,” I began, “in Twelve Hills, Massachusetts, not far from Hyannis Port.”

“Sounds nice,” said Thron, taking notes. “A small town?”

“Very small.”

“And you lived in town?”

“Right in the middle of town,” I said. “Our house was a modest saltbox. Sixteen hundred square feet, not counting the finished basement. We weren’t rich, although both of my parents came from money. My paternal grandparents lost their entire fortune when they were betrayed by a trusted business partner in the late fifties. They moved into the Cape house, and my father grew up there. And I grew up there. The property itself was a gem. Oceanfront. Landscaped with beach heather, wild roses—”

“Fine,” said Thron. “And your parents? Alive or deceased?”

“My mother passed away when I was nine. She’s buried right there in the village cemetery. My father, an entrepreneur, now lives overseas. I rarely see him.”

Thron squinted at the page, and his eyes took on a greasy iridescence. “Hey. You’re not related to the Kennedy Kennedys. Are you?”

I smiled, shrugging.

“The connection,” I said, “is distant.”

I had been bullied in Dorchester. Habitually. The black kids were decent to me on the whole, if only by turning away from my vulnerable stare as if I wasn’t even present, but the Irish American princes who looked like me and lived, like me, in sagging three-story tenements were looking for a fall guy. They tricked me, shoved me, and suckered me, while never being so cruel that I could easily recognize any one of them as the enemy. They made fun of my German accent long after I could have sworn that I no longer had one. On one occasion, a boy no bigger or stronger than me confronted me in the concrete drainage ditch we used as a shortcut home from school. I had never considered this boy an enemy. In fact, we often compared homework on the school steps in the morning — and so I was surprised when he put up his fists and began hopping from one foot to the other.

“Come on, Schroder,” he said anxiously.

I was confused. “Come on and what?”

“Come on and fight. Fight!”

“Why?”

“Because! That’s why!”

I could have fought him. I probably would’ve won. I knew that a victory would bring some relief from the teasing and unchecked xenophobia that surrounded me every day. But I didn’t fight him. I had been taught only to escape. I spied a swinging gate in someone’s chain-link fence and I ran through it and slammed the gate back toward my pursuer.