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8

Kris

When I was a teenager and wanted to sneak out of the house on a school night to be with my friends, I tiptoed shoeless to our creaky front door. Then I waited for some blast of neighborhood noise, a car passing with its stereo blaring, sirens or a truck rumbling along the main street a block away. The moment I had cover I opened the door just enough to squeeze through and stepped out to the porch, where I pulled on my shoes before I headed down the street.

I was seventeen the first and last time I was caught. I returned from a night out to find my father in the living room reading a month-old issue of Lidové Noviny, “the People’s Newspaper,” sent by a friend from the country that was still called Czechoslovakia, although not for much longer.

My parents came to the United States during the Prague Spring, when the Soviets marched into Czechoslovakia and stamped out budding reforms. My father, Gustav—Gus—was a leader in the artists’ community, and his paintings were political in nature, which meant he was in danger. He, my mother, Ida, and sister, Lucie, escaped and eventually made their way to Cleveland, Ohio, where I was born.

On this night he looked up from that nostalgic taste of the country he had been forced to leave and pulled his glasses to the tip of his nose to see me more clearly. “You won’t do this again, Kristoff, correct?”

I remember considering. Sneaking out was one thing, but lying to my parents another.

“I would not like to buy a padlock for our door,” he said, while the moral implications were still racing through my mind. “In case of fire, that could be troublesome.”

I made my case. “I work hard at school, Táta. I’m on the forensics team and the editor of the yearbook. I’ll probably get a college scholarship that pays all my expenses.” To my credit I didn’t add the obvious, that a scholarship was the only way I would get a higher education.

“All this is true,” my father said in his lightly accented English. Unlike my mother he had studied the language before fleeing the country of his birth. Her English came after intensive study here, and Maminka still speaks Czech at home and anywhere else it’s understood.

“I need to have a little fun,” I whined.

“In a car coming home with other boys who have had too much to drink?”

“I walked home.”

He nodded. I remember thinking I was gazing into a mirror or a time machine, because someday I would look much the same. Except for straighter hair and darker eyes I strongly resemble Gustav Lenhart.

“Fun is good,” he said. “We need fun. I am too serious. I know this. I take life too serious. I take myself too serious. I am afraid sometimes I have passed this on to my children.”

“Let tonight be proof you haven’t.”

He laughed. He continued as he preceded me up the stairs. My father has a deep rumbling laugh, and despite taking the world seriously, he still laughs frequently.

He wasn’t laughing a few minutes ago when I hung up from our transatlantic telephone call.

This afternoon as I prepared to leave our suite of offices I didn’t have my shoes in my hand, but I might as well have. I was making a concerted effort not to alert anybody I was leaving before six. Robin had scheduled two housekeeper applicants to interview before dinner. She’d asked me to try to get home to meet them so I could tell her my preference. She’s already done all the footwork, checked references, conducted initial interviews.

Frankly I couldn’t care less whom she chooses. I don’t want any stranger in my house. At the same time I want her to see I’m involved in decisions about our family. Robin has exaggerated my lack of involvement, built it up until it’s now an insurmountable wall between us. Not that she doesn’t have anything to go on. I work long hours, and the nature of my job means I’m at the mercy of our senior partners and clients. Nobody gets ahead at a law firm by saying no, so I can’t always be counted on to arrive home when she wants me to.

The flip side is that in the long run, all this work will be worth it. I made partner at thirty-three, and my star is rising due to hard work and good decisions, but being a partner doesn’t mean my job’s secure. Until I move up to the next level, I’m really just a glorified associate, only I’m paid more. The minute the firm believes I’m letting them down, my rising star becomes a meteor crashing to earth.

I had almost made it down the plushly carpeted hallway to the door leading outside to the elevator when Larry Buffman saw me.

I waited as he approached. He spoke when he was still a few yards away. “I was just on my way to your office, Kris.”

Buff is a nice guy, the senior partner I most often work with. He’s pushing sixty but still filled with energy and savvy. He’s also on his third wife, but not of the trophy variety. Lee was his high school sweetheart, and they found each other again at their thirtieth college reunion. His first wife died too young. His next marriage was short-lived and pure rebound. This one seems solid and happy.

Buff understands about marriage, but he’s never let that stop him from staying late. And he’s never let my marriage influence him to give me a pass, either.

He glanced at his watch. “Mervin Pedersen wants a conference call in fifteen minutes. For the record, he says he likes you and wants you in court, so he wants you on the call. I told him that was our plan all along.”

Hearts don’t sink. It’s physically impossible. On the other hand, they sometimes feel as if they do. Witness mine.

I nodded as if I was happy at this news. “So he’s determined to go ahead with suing the FDA?”

“He’s decided to let us handle whatever we decide together. This could be worth a lot of money to the firm, and I plan to let you bill for a majority of the hours. That should provide the boost you need.”

I knew what boost Buff was talking about. The next step in my career is a promotion to equity partner, where I’ll share in the firm’s profits, resulting in a significant increase in compensation, as well as attain a new level of job security. I’m young for this, and to get there I have to prove once and for all that I can bring major income into the firm and have every intention of continuing to do so until I drop dead at my desk.

Buff tilted his balding head. “Were you heading somewhere?”

“Robin wanted me to come home and help pick a new housekeeper, but we both know she’ll pick the one she likes best anyway.”

“Wise man. She’ll understand if you stay later?”

I nodded. She would understand. She wouldn’t agree, but she would understand what was behind my choice. I’d told her often enough, especially lately.

Buff was nodding along with me, and we probably looked like a couple of bobblehead dolls. “When I had to work late as a young man I had a system. I added up the hours when I should have been home with Nan, my first wife, multiplied by ten and sent flowers worth that much. Or sometimes I took her to 1789 in Georgetown when the figure got high enough. If I tried that with Lee she would divorce me. She can’t be bribed or cajoled.”

Lee Buffman has a lot in common with my wife.

“Robin’s going out of town to work for the next few months,” I said, since letting Buff know right now might cushion the blow when I started leaving work earlier. “She has an opportunity she can’t afford to miss.”

“Tell me again what she does? Something to do with flowers, right?”

I managed not to wince. “The garden’s more of a hobby. She’s a photographer, a photojournalist.” I realized he needed a little more, and I’m not ashamed to brag about my wife. “That’s how we met back in 2000, during the Gore-Bush election recount. She was there as a freelancer taking photos. One of them made its way to U.S. News & World Report. She’s had others in Time, People.” That last, of course, was a photo spread of Cecilia.

“You have young children.” It wasn’t a question.

“Not that young. Ten and twelve. I may be working from home a bit more than usual in the next few months, but we’re hiring the housekeeper to take up the slack.”

“Slack doesn’t begin to cover it, Kris. If I was lucky I saw my children on weekends. Then, by the time they hit puberty, they weren’t around on weekends anymore. Now I have grandchildren I rarely see.” He paused, looked wistful just long enough, and then grinned. “Truth is, I never did like little kids all that much.”

I laughed, because whether he liked kids or not, the story, like all Buff’s stories, was purely for effect, one of his friendly little object lessons. They worked especially well in a courtroom.

“I need you for that call,” he said, getting back to business. “And you need to be there for your own reasons.”

“I’ll call Robin and let her know.”

He clapped me on the back. “Good man.”

In my office I loosened my tie, a Father’s Day gift last summer from Pet and Nik. If you look closely you see that the pattern is actually hands clasped, dozens in each row, but from a distance it looks like just another geometric exercise. Last week Robin told me the tie is like life. You have to examine both carefully to see how closely woven we humans are, but the truth is always right there if we look for it.

Robin isn’t particularly philosophical, or at least she wasn’t. Nothing is quite the way it used to be before she began the slow crawl toward her fortieth birthday. How much of that was a factor in her decision to follow Cecilia around the country? How much was Talya’s death or her own brush with it? I guess it hardly matters.

I dialed our home phone and let it ring repeatedly. If she was in the garden it might take her a few moments to get to her feet and inside, find where she’d left it and answer. I was about to try her cell, even though she rarely remembers to carry it, when she picked up.

“Kris? Are you in the car?”

That was becoming as common a salutation as “hello.”

“I wish. I got caught just as I was walking out. I doubt I’ll get out of here in the next hour. Can you go ahead without me? I’ll just have to trust your judgment on who to hire.”

She ignored that. “I just hung up with your mother.”

I put the phone on speaker and my head in my hands. “I was going to tell you about that tonight.”

“You canceled the trip to Prague? Without talking to me first?”

“I wanted to make sure I could actually get most of our money back before I told you. By the time I talked to somebody at the airlines it didn’t make sense to do anything but cancel. The rep was willing to bend a few rules and help us, and I wasn’t sure the next one would be so accomodating.”

“Ida says you have to prepare for a trial? She’s very unhappy. She called me to see if there was anything I could do.” Robin gave a humorless laugh. “That was the only funny part of the call.”

I let that pass. “If everything goes well maybe we can get over there in the spring for a few days.”

“But Lucie’s whole family will be there at Christmas. Last week your mother emailed a list of places she and your father want to take us while we’re all together, places your family came from, elderly relatives we’ll only meet this once. This means everything to them, especially Gus. He’s seventy-two, and he needs you to see him as a success, Kris. He left everything behind when he fled, including his best chance to be an artist people will remember. Now he’s getting a little of the recognition he deserves at last. He needs you to see that before he dies.”

For a woman who had once refused to express herself, Robin had come a long way. “Do we have to do this over the phone?”

“Please reconsider.”

“It’s not just the trial. With you leaving I’m going to be out of the office more. I can’t afford ten days away, even over the holidays.”

“You’re blaming this on me?” She sounded incredulous.

“No, it’s just a fact. If you go, even if we hire Mary Poppins, I’ll still be away from my desk more than usual.” I thought about the conversation I’d just had. “And now it’s more crucial than ever for me to perform at top speed.”

“If I go?”

“The timing couldn’t be worse for me.”

The line was silent a moment. “Let me ask, then. Are you saying that if I stay, you’ll take the time at Christmas, and we’ll fly to the Czech Republic to be with your family the way we planned?”

I’ve had to make a lot of decisions I don’t like lately, and I’m not always happy with the man I’ve become. But one thing I’m not is a blackmailer.

“I’m not saying that. I can’t go away no matter what. It’s true your leaving would have made going harder, but it’s the trial that makes it impossible.”

“Glad to hear it. For the record, I wasn’t going to accept the blame and stay home.”

“Are we done?”

“Not quite. I’ve been waffling. I got the tentative filming schedule today. No matter how much I don’t want to, I’ll have to miss Pet’s big piano recital. And neither of the housekeepers I’m interviewing is interested in attending Nik’s soccer games.”

“Welcome to the too-busy-at-work club.”

“But the difference between us? I would never, under any circumstances, miss an occasion as important as the Christmas trip. This is one of the most memorable moments in the life of your family, and you’re not going to be there to share it.”

“You know what? You’re blowing the whole thing out of proportion because you never had a real family of your own or memorable moments.” The moment the words emerged, I wished I could crawl under the desk and bang my head. “Look, that sounds a lot worse than I meant it to. I just mean I had lots of memorable moments when I was growing up, and this is just one more.”

“Oh, I heard you. I was waffling a little, but now, you know what? I’m not. I have your permission to hire the housekeeper I like best?”

“Do what you want.”

“I’d suggest eating dinner before you come home because I’m not cooking tonight. I’m going to let the kids sit in on the interviews, and we can make our choice over dinner. See, I actually do have a family, and I’m going to make a memorable moment with them on my own. Without you. You have a nice evening.”

She hung up and I stared out the window that had been my reward when I made partner the first time. How much bigger would the next one be?

Would it be worth everything I would have to do to earn it?