I suppose that some of our differences stem from our respective upbringings. While Jane was raised in a small town with three siblings and parents who adored her, I was raised in a town house in Washington, D.C., as the only child of government lawyers, and my parents were seldom home before seven o’clock in the evening. As a result, I spent much of my free time alone, and to this day, I’m most comfortable in the privacy of my den.
As I’ve already mentioned, we have three children, and though I love them dearly, they are for the most part the products of my wife. She bore them and raised them, and it’s she with whom they are most comfortable. I feel the occasional pang of regret at the thought of all I missed while spending so many hours at the office and in my den. But I’m comforted by the thought that Jane more than made up for my absences, as evidenced by how well our kids turned out. They’re grown now and living on their own, but we’re fortunate that only one has moved out of state. My two daughters still visit us frequently, and my wife is careful to have their favorite foods in the refrigerator in case they’re hungry, which they never seem to be.
At twenty-seven, Anna is the oldest. Her looks—dark hair and even darker eyes—reflect her saturnine personality. She was a brooder who spent her teenage years locked in her room, listening to gloomy music and writing in a diary. She was a stranger to me back then; days might pass before she would say a single word in my presence and I was at a loss to understand what I might have done to provoke this. Everything I said seemed to elicit only sighs or shakes of her head; and if I asked what was wrong, she would stare at me as if the question was incomprehensible. My wife seemed to find nothing unusual in this, dismissing it as a phase typical of young girls, but then again, Anna still talked to her. Sometimes, I’d pass by Anna’s room and hear
Anna and Jane whispering to each other; but if they heard me outside the door, the whispering would stop. Later, when I would ask Jane what they’d been discussing, she’d shrug and wave a hand mysteriously, as if their only goal was to keep me in the dark.
Yet because she was my firstborn, Anna has always been my favorite. This isn’t an admission I would make to anyone, but I think Anna knows it. There’s a special bond between us. Lately, I’ve come to believe that even in her silent years, she had been fonder of me than I realized. I can still remember times when I would be working in my den, and she would slip through the door. She would wander around the room, scanning the bookshelves and reaching for various objects, but if I addressed her, she would slip back out as quietly as she’d come in. Over time, I learned not to speak, and she would sometimes sit in the office for an hour, watching me as I scribbled on yellow legal tablets. If I looked up, she would smile complicitly, as if enjoying this game of ours.
Currently, Anna is working for the Raleigh News and Observer, but I think she has dreams of becoming a novelist. In college, she majored in creative writing and the stories she wrote were as dark as her personality. I recall reading one in which a young girl becomes a prostitute to care for her sick father, a man who had once molested her. When I set the pages down, I wondered what I was supposed to make of such a thing.
She is also madly in love. Anna, always careful and deliberate in her choices, was also selective when it came to men, and thankfully Keith has always struck me as someone who treats her well. He’s a resident in orthopedics at Duke Medical School. I learned through Jane that for their first date Keith took Anna kite flying on the beach near Fort Macon. Later that week, when Anna brought him by the house, Keith came dressed in a sport coat, freshly showered and smelling faintly of cologne. As we shook hands, he met my eyes and impressed me by saying, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lewis.”
Joseph, our second born, is a year younger than Anna, and again, we have little in common. He’s taller and thinner than I am, wears jeans to most social functions, and when he visits at Thanksgiving or Christmas, he eats only vegetables. Like Jane, he was empathetic even as a child and he chewed his fingernails worrying about others. They’ve been nothing but nubs since he was five years old. Needless to say, when I suggested that he consider majoring in business or economics, he ignored my advice and chose sociology. He now works for a battered women’s shelter in New York City, though he tells us nothing more about his job. I know he wonders about the choices I’ve made in my life, just as I wonder about his, but despite our differences, we get along well. It is with Joseph that I have the conversations that I always wished to have with my children when I held them as infants. He is highly intelligent; he received a near perfect score on his SATs and his interests span the spectrum from the history of middle-eastern dhimmitudes to theoretical applications of fractal geometry. It goes without saying that I am often at a disadvantage when it comes to debating him, but it is during such moments that I am especially proud to call him my son.