Chapter 6

“Cat, before you start that new book, dear,” Kate asked. “do you think I might borrow Charles?”

“C’mon, Cat,” said Kathleen. “It might be a miserable day outside, but you don’t have to sit in one place all day. I have something to show you upstairs.” While she and Cat went up to look at her last doll, Charles followed Kate into the dining room.

“As I’ve said, dear, this is a planned feast. Midday, perhaps, but Sunday dinners are midday. Why not Thursday dinners? Anyway, I thought of calling on you to say grace. Then I thought that springing it on you would be no favor. Would you be willing?”

“Certainly. And thanks for the warning.”

“You haven’t been asked yet, dear. Don’t start until I ask you, but I will.” The timer went off in her pocket, and she went into the kitchen to check on the ham. It looked fine. She turned off the stove and opened the dish washer. She set the timer to warn her when the vegetables should start cooking.

While they were gone, Jeanette had suggested to Bob that they take their showers then. The idea of bathing in the middle of the day rather than long lines for the bathroom in the morning had seemed to work.

“You, of course, could stay down here until I’m done. People to talk to.”

“Yeah, I could.” But, since the alternative was watching Jeanette change, he went upstairs. Some things ranked even talking in Bob’s preferences.

So Charles was alone when he came back to the living room. He went over to the bookshelves. When you consider that each Brennan had his own books in his own room -- he’d stayed in Bob’s room his first visit and in Kath’s for his later visits -- the family selection was intriguing. The famous Britannica was years out of date, older than Kath. Several atlases seemed to have been published at about 20 year intervals, the latest quite recently. Neither of Kath’s parents seemed to have ever discarded a college textbook. (He knew that Kath had most of hers in their apartment.) Five separate translations of the Bible were shelved next to each other. Paperbacks, the ones he checked being sociology for general readers, were stacked on their faces on several shelves. There didn’t seem to be any novels. He pulled Death and Life of Great American Cities from the stack he’d examined earlier.

“Find anything interesting?” Kate asked when she came in. He held up the book. “Russ discovered Jane Jacobs soon after we moved here from New York. Rather bad news, you know, dear. You’ve just left the place best designed for living. I didn’t read it until the summer after I’d started teaching. I don’t read outside my studies while I’m studying. My children are much more voracious than I am.” He wasn’t sure that only reading non-textbooks when you weren’t in school disqualified her as a bookworm. Most people didn’t read much when they weren’t required to; he’d known any number in his undergraduate days who didn’t even read assignments. But he had another question.

“Did you and your husband have your own stashes like your kids did?”

“Oh, yes. Parents are more generous, of course. ‘He’d like this. Let’s leave this downstairs; she might like it.’ You don’t think of what your sibling might like. But that is only relatively generous. If you want to find a book again, you keep it where you know where it is. My art history books are still in my room. The two lower shelves there on the right? That’s what Russ had in his office.”

“I didn’t see many novels.”

“Well, the three left-hand stacks of paperbacks on the top shelf are novels. Many in the third stack, dear, are the sort of novel you read for college courses. We gave novels to the kids when they were young, of course, but the library is better for that sort of thing. How many novels do you reread?”

“And I saw art-history books.”

“Those are the ones in which France is prominent. I sent them to Jeanette and left them downstairs after she returned them. Easier to keep track of which she’s seen that way. She likes to say that she is a Brennan, and so she is. But I don’t think I’ve ever lent her a book she didn’t return. You’ll never hear me say that about Bob or Kathleen.”

“I keep hearing complaints about kids who never read. You seem to have produced two who read all the time. Is it just the genes?”

“Probably not, but it might as well be, dear. Russ came home from a hard day at the office and curled up with a book after supper -- sometimes with the paper or a magazine. He was addicted to news shows and, sometimes, to radio news. But he got his entertainment from print. I’m a little that way, myself. So, how did our kids think that adults entertained themselves? And, of course, we can recommend fascinating books we’d read ourselves.

“Smoking parents have smoking kids. Parents who tipple but tell kids that they’re too young to drink have kids who sneak drinks. Parents who read to themselves and read to their kids have kids who think that they’re big enough to read their own books. It’ll happen to Cat soon enough. Not when you’re around, probably. You can see her gloat when she’s got Charles to hold her and read to her. But, one of these days, she’ll declare her independence by reading her own book.”

“Is she really doing that?” Charles asked.

“Quite definitely, dear. And Bob is jealous. She sits beside him when he reads to her. Not at bedtime of course, but that’s not holding, either.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll...”

“Why be sorry dear? Do you enjoy it?”

“Very much.”

“And she enjoys it. It’s what I said about intelligent selfishness. So long as she asks politely rather than throwing a tantrum when you aren’t available, so long as it is mutually enjoyable, as long as it isn’t dangerous for her or somebody else, then she should get what she enjoys. Bob would tell you the same thing. He wants Cat to get the enjoyment of your holding her. He just wishes that she still enjoyed his holding her.

“That’s the thing about growing up.” Kate continued. “She’s fighting her parents with might and main to get independence. And they want her to have independence. You’d think that fight could be settled in a conference, but it never is. And my children, dear, were quite used to conferences and negotiation.”

“I don’t see her kicking and screaming.”

“I haven’t seen her kick. We both heard her scream the other night. I understand that she has been known to throw a full-blown tantrum or two. More usually, she pushes. She doesn’t run away from home, she sits beside her father when he reads to her. And, as I said, she will declare her independence by reading her own book one of these days. She already reads her school lessons, although first-grade school lessons aren’t exactly Moby Dick. They aren’t even Hop on Pop.

“But when a child declares her independence, parents may be wistful, but they are also happy.”

Charles noted, “You didn’t seem very happy when Kath declared her independence.”

“I found the way she did it quite insensitive, dear. Look, in Vi’s -- in Kathleen’s -- early high-school days, she spoke to me often about her romantic feelings. Some boys she adored from afar, some seemed to like her but the feeling was definitely not reciprocated. You heard about Terry. In the middle of that relationship, I went from her confidant to her inquisitor. And, dear, I hadn’t changed one thing. ‘Is there something you want to tell me, dear?’ ‘Why do you keep hounding me?’ After that, we knew when she went on dates and with whom. What she felt about it was a deep, dark, secret. Of course, you could look at her and see whether she were happy or unhappy, but she wasn’t about to tell you why.

“After she went to college,” Kate continued, “we never heard even that. I presume she went to college dances and all the other sorts of dates. College is much better than high school; high-school social occasions are really set up by adults. Anyway, I never complained. She had flown out of the nest. I prayed that she didn’t get pregnant or seriously hurt, but I didn’t inquire. She was writing to Jeanette, sometimes, and that made me grateful. I figured that she’d be willing to tell her more than she was willing to tell me.” “But your toleration changed.”

“I tolerated silence. I didn’t enjoy it, but I respected it. Now, let me tell you how Kathleen should have behaved with regard to her parents. She may have made mistakes with regard to you, but that’s your business. ‘One of my classmates whom I especially want you to meet is Charles; he’s been a great friend these last two years.’ Or however long it had been by graduation, dear. A letter: ‘You met Charles. He’s more than a friend. I think we’re in love.’ And, then, ‘Mother, I’d like to bring Charles home. You should know him better, and he should know you better.’ If she’d done that, dear, we’d not have complained, we’d have done the same thing we did on your first trip. We’d have put you in Bob’s room. Then, we’d have locked our door. Of course, your second trip -- when Bob and Jeanette and Cat were home -- would have been more awkward.

“Look, you find the way she and Bob squabble immature, don’t you?”

“Well, yes.” Which was criticizing his wife, which was something you should never do, but how could he deny that?

“But she’s upstairs playing with a doll. You don’t find that immature.”

“She’s entertaining Cat.”

“Which is the acme of maturity, really,” Kate said, “even though she’s doing it by actions three decades below her age level. Well, in a sense, squabbling with Bob is the same kind of game. She is playing the little kid she used to be. Both of them are quite capable of resisting. In the family, they don’t see the use of doing so. But, when she proclaims that she is sexually active, she thinks the activity demonstrates maturity. She should read the statistics, sometime. But, in fact, the proclamation demonstrates immaturity.

“But I should leave you to your book. Sorry!’

“Not at all. This was fascinating. You find Kath immature and Bob mature.”

“Different kinds of maturity, dear. And different kinds of immaturity. Don’t let Cat read Hop on Pop with you, dear. She is used to acting it out with Bob. Jeanette is quite capable of talking as if Bob were her second child. She also insists that Bob is an absolute rock when she needs him. Bob can be childish in many, unimportant, ways. After all, the sibling rivalry is quite mutual.

“On the other hand, even Russ became convinced that Bob was acting as an adult as a husband and a father. And Russ was very hard to convince, dear. The university must find him satisfactory. Jeanette has been the primary parent, and she talks to Cat mostly in French -- not entirely, but mostly. Cat clearly has a better English vocabulary than most of her classmates. She must have got that from Bob. Which means, silliness like ‘portcullis’ aside, that he spends a decent amount of time with her.

“The way she behaved night before last tells you something, dear,” she continued. “Whatever Kathleen might say, reciting poetry at you doesn’t count as abuse. It might be abuse of the poem. And Cat obviously knew that she wouldn’t get further punishment for mouthing off while he was doing it. On the other hand, when he threatened to carry her bodily upstairs, the threat was credible. Large men have advantages as parents. I could never have carried a struggling seven-year-old up a flight of stairs.”

“So, strength is a requirement for a good parent?” Charles asked.

“An advantage, dear. But I’m not making myself clear. Bob might have an immature sense of humor, he might squabble with his sister in a way that they ought to have outgrown well before you met her, let alone him, but he relates to his wife and child as a responsible adult. In one of his fights with his father -- and, dear, you only think that Kathleen and I have disagreements; Russ and Bob used to go at it hammer-and-tongs -- in one of those arguments, Bob claimed to have all the negative virtues. Maybe not quite all, dear, adults shouldn’t tell fart jokes. But he was talking to Russ, after all.

“‘Negative virtues’ sounds like those defenses of politicians who get caught with their hands in the cookie jar,” Kate continued. “‘After all, he didn’t rob banks or cheat on his wife.’ But, really, while being in the best ninety percent of people in one area isn’t saying much, being in the best ninety percent of people in area after area starts looking like an accomplishment. If all that the good you could say about Bob was that he wasn’t a drunk or a wife-beater, it would be damning with faint praise. But Bob not only lacks a great many negatives, he has several important positives.”

“Where I want specifics is the negatives Bob lacks,” Kathleen said from the stairs. “I can’t think of any.”

“Why, dear, I just listed a few. He isn’t a drunk or a wife-beater.”

“He isn’t, as far as we know, a member of Al Qaeda, either. That exhausts the list. By the way, Mom, I told Cat she could play with that doll in my room if she visited when I wasn’t here.”

“That’s very generous of you, dear. Now, about Bob, you really should save your insults for when he’s present. Bob has a juvenile sense of humor. He scraps with you in quite a childish way, but you aren’t in a position to point that out. I can’t really think of any other vices.”

“He can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

“Hardly a moral fault, dear.”

“He’s hard on poor Jeanette.”

“In what way,” asked poor Jeanette from the stairs. “He’ll be down in a minute. But I want to hear how he mistreats me, and don’t get vulgar about ‘hard.’”

“You have more than your share of household and child-care duties.”

“As I told your father some years ago -- nearly seven; how time flies -- how the two of us divide our chores is nobody’s business but our own. As far as child-care goes, he and I share more than most couples.”

“I was just telling Charles, dear, that Cat’s English vocabulary demonstrates that Bob spends a good deal of time with her.”

“And the club of husbands who do the family laundry just elected Bob president unanimously. I said he’d been unfair to vote for himself, but he said that he voted to break a tie.”

“Jeanette! Other husbands do the laundry.”

“Not all that many. And he kept doing it when I was home all day.”

“Well, if you’re satisfied...” Kathleen trailed off.

“And I am. That’s not the main reason I love the man, but it’s one reason to like him.”

“Well, I credit Cat’s sunny nature to you, despite Bob. I just hope that sometime, maybe like when she’s eighteen, you’ll stop praising her for actions that would have been praiseworthy at eight.”

“Your generosity, dear, at least the generosity I praised, was not in letting Cat play with your doll, but leaving it here instead of taking it to Philadelphia to entice her into a visit.”

“We, although we would be glad to see you,” Charles said,” don’t really have room in the apartment to be adequate hosts. And we’re probably stuck there until my student loans are paid off.”

“Did you two go that far in debt?” Bob had finally joined the group.

“My student loans are paid off, Bob, and we have money in the bank,” Kathleen said. “Don’t look at me. Char’s the one who went all macho on me.”

“Well, it’s your inheritance.”

“When I was first starting to practice, Char helped pay the office rent. I wasn’t bringing in even that much, let alone apartment rent and groceries. Now, he wants to pay the rent alternate months.”

“I don’t want to live off my wife. I make enough to pay my share.”

“You may not think I have any right to speak as a man who lived off my wife for years and years, but I think the money you put into her office rent, and the other expenses Kathleen didn’t have to cover as she started up, were investments in the family enterprise. You two should incorporate as ‘Paradox Inc.’”

Kathleen said, “Pair of docs. Bob, you are impossible.”

“No, as I tell Jeanette, merely unlikely. Anyway, the family enterprise is making a profit. You ought to allow it to pay dividends like apartment rent.”

“And I’m not so sure that we shouldn’t look for a house now.”

“Kath!”

“Home prices and mortgage interest are both quite low. We aren’t going to see that again any time soon.”

“There speaks Russell Brennan’s daughter,” said Bob. “and she’s right. Stopped clock.”

“And it’s not like we’ll have all that much choice. We want a neighborhood we’ll both be comfortable in. We’ll look forever even in this market.”

“Well, dear, investment opportunities aside, is the chance of a visit from your niece the reason? Remember, at this age, she travels with her father.”

“No. I just started thinking, and one thing led to another.”

“Can happen,” bob said. “Try it again some time.”

“You can’t really say he’s the aggressor, this time, dear. Ignore him, and tell me how it started.”

“It started, really, with a piano. But it didn’t end there. We need one, and the apartment won’t hold one. A keyboard, or maybe a spinet. But, I thought, Char really should play a serious instrument. At least a baby grand, maybe a parlor grand. That got me thinking about houses, And that got me thinking that this was the right time. Usually, the low interest rates are met by high house prices.”