Kathleen Alcott: Infinite Home

Owen had earned good grades and befriended beady-eyed little boys who turned into greedy, scheming young men. Edith made them after-school sandwiches and listened through the door: they afforded no one mercy, not the shy bucktoothed girl with long braids or the young teacher with the stammer. Once he got to high school, Owen, already tall and fine-fingered, developed a reputation as a salesman. He sold pencils and toffees at half the store cost at first, then expanded his enterprise through the hire and development of a ring of bookish types who wrote term papers feverishly in the library. Edith learned about it only when a concerned mother did Owen the favor of calling his parents rather than the principal. Afterward, he made atonal apologies and pursued his studies with new conviction, often tacking up and checking off neat to-do lists in capital letters, and ultimately landed at Duke on a full scholarship. Following one sixteen-hour return for Thanksgiving, during which he spoke only to ask after salt and pepper, he expressed implicitly that his need for family — had it ever been there — was no longer extant. Edith and Declan were to him like a house he had once rented.

Declan took pains to keep up with Owen’s professional pursuits, but Edith stopped sending birthday cards after five years without a thank-you note or a call, and often recalled breastfeeding her son, how much less urgently he had sucked than his sister, how infrequently he’d cried.

DIAGNOSES OF WILLIAMS SYNDROME were rare then — one in twenty thousand births, sources would note much later — and Lydia quickly lost the energy required to say, “There is something different about my son, yes, but he does not belong here.” “Here” being among these other children labeled as impaired, sedate and taciturn compared with Paulie. He is six years old and understands and uses words like magnetic and illuminate, she always felt like asserting. He remembers whole songs after hearing them just once.

She began homeschooling him after the third failed experiment in an institution for “children like him,” undertaking the mission as if it were as natural as breathing, forever designing lessons and searching for signs that he’d absorbed them. She tried and tried with numbers, with zippers and shoelaces, and later rewarded him (and herself, she admitted) with narrative and music, the environments in which he thrived. When Seymour returned home, she smiled up at him wearily as Paulie yelped and covered his father in kisses. Love grew a bigger mystery by the day.

It was only after a sudden and ambitious cancer finally nullified the electricity of Lydia’s thoughts and the generosity of her limbs that the heartfelt profiles of others like Paulie appeared in the Times , on hour-long specials on NPR. That the experts marveled, as Lydia had, at the bubbling wit of those with Williams syndrome, the unflagging affection and trust, the proclivity towards music and song; at the inability to complete the simplest puzzle, to understand the way quarters became a dollar. That studies identified an array of likely comorbidities. More often than not, congenital heart disease. Anxiety. Hypothyroidism. A shortened life expectancy.

Seven years after Lydia’s death, while sifting through staticky radio stations on an autumn drive home, Seymour stumbled across a program that came through the airwaves as clear and bright as a gong: it told the story he’d sat in the middle of without hope of understanding, and he pulled the car over to the shoulder and gripped the leather steering wheel, and was, for a full fifty-three minutes, still.

WITH THE FADING OF THE NINETIES, Edward had watched both himself and the crowds at the clubs changing. They were more tired and less willing to laugh, and he, equivalently, felt less and less like teasing their Coors-addled brains. His hair grew long from neglect, and he alienated most audiences, though he garnered a minuscule cult following of people who dubbed him “the lost comic” for the way he wandered across the stage, gaping at the spotlights as though they were cryptic signs in a foreign tongue. He couldn’t explain it except to say that it had simply ceased, burned off like an atmospheric layer—“it” being whatever had lived in him that had drawn punch lines from human behavior, that had identified the rhythm stitched between silence and speech, between precipitation and execution. The clubs eventually withdrew their offers, at least those he hadn’t severed ties with of his own profanity-strewn accord, and his friends took to rolling their eyes at his endless string of clichéd ontological concerns. They would come over and he would fix drinks and put on avant-garde albums — one favorite a meandering recording of airplane takeoffs and landings — and he would say absurd things like: Do you feel that growing old is something we should all be doing a little more consciously?

And: Have you considered that probably each day of your life has changed you? If there was a way to track that, would you?

And, of course: Have you seen Helena? Has her hair grown out or has she kept it short? Does she still walk like that?

—

THE FIRST WINTER WITHOUT HER, Edward read Kant and Wittgenstein with a sophomoric fervor and an oversized highlighter, dressed in grays and blacks like the rest of the city, and avoided a series of phone calls from Los Angeles. Thirteen months before, towards the beginning of the end, at the urging of his agent, he had written a screenplay during a five-day cocaine binge. It was an insipid script — write a Christmas movie, his agent had said, they want one from you, the “they” always changing, the interest always urgent — that concerned a down-on-his-luck mall Santa and a series of perfectly timed misunderstandings, plus a beauty far out of Santa’s league and a greasy Italian shoe-store owner as the antagonist.

“The thing,” as Edward called it, never referring to it by its ludicrous title, had now sprouted hideous blooms everywhere: billboards in subway stations, marquees downtown, print ads, echoes of punch lines in sports bars by men whose idea of humor was straight regurgitation. He would see a particularly beer-saturated group outside a pub, their breath visible in the fifteen-degree weather, their Neanderthal faces red and loosened, and sense it coming like an arthritic feels a storm. Hey, Antonio, check out this North Pole! And he would hurry around them, eaten with alarm.

He continued to accept payment for the thing, though even that filled him with pulsing dread: in every gourmet dinner he ate or cashmere sweater he purchased, he saw the look of panic in the main actor’s face as frozen in the poster, the jumble of gift boxes at his feet, the beauty next to him with a shopping bag, the evil shoe proprietor leaning in with a textbook smirk on the other side. He had gone to see it the very first week, if only to grasp at some understanding of the man who had been capable of such asinine pursuits in the name of too much money. He left waitresses and cab drivers, especially those who seemed unhappy, extraordinary tips drawn from a great well of guilt. He tried to forgive his mother, which he found much easier since her death, and let his father talk to him about the monstrosity of the world for as long as the old man deigned. He cleaned the dishes until they were gleaming, the brilliant red pots Helena had left behind in her hurry to transform, and spent slow hours imagining an inviolate place where he wouldn’t feel his past as if it were some punishing physical affliction.