Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I grinned and changed gear. ‘Hi, Phil!’ I went towards him with one arm extended, and touched him on the shoulder. ‘Hi,’ he replied. A smile fled across his face. It was clear enough that he had been waiting for me but there was a childlike wariness to our greeting, like that of schoolboys introduced to each other by their parents. ‘How have you been? I didn’t see you downstairs.’ ‘Oh, I was there,’ he said. ‘Earlier on.’ He picked up his bag. It was impossible for either of us to say ‘Well, is this it, then?’; instead we found ourselves going towards the door together. A close follower of Corry form might have seen it as an interesting development—a suspicion confirmed by Michael, at the reception-desk, who said, ‘Goodnight, gentlemen’ in a tone of bitter reproach. It was about 8.30 and in the winter ‘Goodnight’ would have been the instinctive word; but Phil and I strolled out on to the street to find the sky still bright, the pavements and the buildings warm. The slow, late expanses of a high summer evening were before us. I carried on talking and, without hesitating turned not towards the station but in the direction of the Queensberry Hotel. We reacted differently to the slight panic of the occasion, he shutting up completely and looking very serious, whilst I carried on with unnatural brightness and ease. ‘Mm, it’s good to be out in the open air,’ I said. ‘What a beautiful evening!’ He seemed unable to find a reply to this. ‘It gets so crowded in there,’ I expanded. ‘Oh—yes …’ he said, catching and letting go the conversational straw. We walked on, and I came very close to him for a step or two, as one does walking with a friend: our upper arms brushed and then parted once, twice, with a gentle lurch in my stride. When we had started touching, everything would be all right, I told myself. ‘Yes,’ he added, ‘it can get very crowded.’ I turned towards him with a broad, calculated grin. ‘That’s because chaps like you hog the weights all the time.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Because I was in a state I knew I might give any contact a disconcerting charge of feeling and talked to him deliberately about his work. He played in a period-instrument band that met three or four times a week and gave regular concerts in the Cathedral and in other places across Flanders—I'd seen him come in a few nights before with the discreetly odd black case that housed his bombard, though it suggested a surgical device of the most specialized kind. They were called the Guenther van der Musycke—a name no more arthritic than most such consorts—and comprised singers as well as instrumentalists. Sometimes he brought one or two of them to the Cassette, but they sat apart, made childish jokes and left early. Gerard told me they had a record coming out soon and spoke about the ancient religious music of the town with such enthusiasm that I almost came to believe in his high estimate of the various masses and motets and other attainments of primitive polyphony that he was describing. A couple of drinks later he was still holding forth on late medieval life there, the unceasing round of ritual and worship, chants and processions, the festive days and offices. I drifted in and out of it; I felt he could be speaking to anyone. The image of Luc's back flared up again and again and made me gulp my beer down. Gerard spoke of the forever progressing Burgundian court. Sometimes brief highlights from Obrecht and Dufay were provided in the cracked croon that you hear on rehearsal records by elderly conductors. It seemed in May this year the Ghezellen had played their shawms and sackbuts in the procession of the Holy Cross and created some bad feeling among the conventional members of the town band. At Christmas they planned a recreation of the festivities at the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York, in which the supper music was all performed by players disguised as animals: Gerard himself was to be a hare, and his colleagues would be lions, goats, bears and wolves. Seven monkeys would do a morris-dance. Apparently there had been a dromedary present at the original event, though it did not actually play. I looked over his shoulder to where the dusk was falling in the deserted street and in all the silent streets and courts beyond. I could picture my walk home, through the back lane called the Blind Fox and out into the floodlit square.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Young Echevin came to see me after lunch: he was late, couldn't find the place, had disturbed the doctor's difficult old housekeeper (who asked rather pointedly that it shouldn't happen again), and sat pink and wheezing through the scheduled hour of our conversation. He was a severe asthmatic, as I knew from his father's letter, and had been absent from school for much of the previous year, gazing out from a dustless sanatorium near Brussels. I felt a twinge of pity for him, and remembered schoolfellows obscurely stigmatised by diabetes or inhibiting allergies. The same involuntary unlovely quality hung about Marcel; plus he was fat and anxious and maladroit. His asthma provided the main topic of discussion, and gave me glimpses of the boy's tame, glass-cabined world; it had limited his experience cruelly. Several staples of these lessons—sport, nature, what we had done in the pollinous summer holidays—were almost inaccessible to him; his own august had been spent playing video games (and for a minute his vocabulary took on an impenetrable self-confidence). A new drug had been his salvation—that and television, which had given him a certain scrambled knowledge of current affairs that he was too incurious and short-winded to make sense of. Our primary rule—that we spoke only in English—was frequently broken; "I do not know, I do not understand" was his timid refrain. And I was recollecting my tutorial manner, out of the vacant social politeness that our chit-chat parodied, and a sudden pedantry or loss of patience which alarmed him and brought him close to tears. Of course his other tutors, for maths and history and so on, all talked to him in friendly Flemish, they were local people who shared his world of reference. It took me a moment to see how alien I was—I felt myself being dreaded, in what I hoped was an unusual way, and not being sure whether to live up to it or try to soften it down. Marcel wore bright-coloured kids' leisure-wear, as though he was usually out on a bike or a skateboard, and had a huge wristwatch with various rotating bezels and inset dials that might have been of use to a sports coach, deep-sea diver or trader on the international markets. He looked at it with disarming frequency, so that I began to ask him each time how long was left. I was as keen as he was for the hour to be up. The shock came towards the end, when I asked him how long he'd suffered from asthma, and if he knew why he had it, a two-part question which I felt was unwise with a beginner, it might fluster him and only one half would get answered. He looked away and I saw a change in the colour of his unhappiness. "Yes, I can tell why," he said. "And when."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Over to the right from one of the high barred windows of that institutional building which had so far remained silent and dark, three boys were peeing into the canal. They stood up on the windowsill, pressed against the bars, and directed their dying arcs up and out—presumably in a contest to see who could reach the furthest. I watched them finish and stand down whilst the shaving-foam thinned in an almost noiseless crepitation over my stubble. In a moment or two another trio took up their positions, we heard a command quite strictly barked inside, and the one on the left was away already. It must almost have been a false start. The other two followed a few seconds later, first in hesitant spurts and tinkles, but growing in confidence until for a while all three were at full cock, like a guard of honour. I don't think any of them reached our side of the canal, but number one made the finest impression and had the greatest capacity: he was still going strong as the other two's offerings dwindled and trailed home across the water and a breeze caught them and frayed their thinning plumes. I understood for the first time that this patched-up brick barracks of a place was the school of St Narcissus itself and that today being the rentrée the young gentlemen were reasserting some immemorial right. Cherif and I watched a couple more rounds, until the novelty began to wear off and a hand-bell was heard tolling. Then I realised that there would be this new element in my life, and that across the little lost garden below, where nothing but a blackbird ever stirred among the leaves, there would come week in week out the noises of a school: the bells, the blurred unison of lessons and chapel, the scraping back of a hundred chairs, the abrupt silences and eruptions of racket. It was clear on the streets, too, as I walked over to the Altidores', that things had changed: a flat-footed straggler with his shirt-tails hanging out came panting past me and stopped, wincing with the stitch; two truants tugged off their ties before slipping into a video shop; in a sudden sally from a side-street a games-kitted crocodile lurched at a run into my path, headed by a manic bald master. It was the first day and there were the children caught up already in the severe rhythms of school, and looking back, like conscripts on a ship, to the lazy shore of home. For a moment I shared the truants' defiance and guilt and my heart raced with a long-forgotten panicky anticipation: I had to assert myself against the obscure medicinal hollowness of school. And of course my first assignation with Luc loomed and made me feel half master and half victim.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Echevin was a late father, a handsome man in his sixties, pleasantly bald, and without the moustache I for some reason expected him to wear, so that his face had a sensitive, surprised look of some charm. His eyes were large, with oaky flecks in their pale blue pupils. He had on the grey suiting of a business man, but with unusual tucks and vents, which seemed to hint at his role in the arts. The housekeeper came back with a jug of punch (Mrs Vivier, Mrs Vivier) and he offered me a glass with a little murmur, as if he hadn't yet decided if we were going to be friends. I was hot and on edge and gabbled about Rubens and the charm of old brick in my most ingratiating manner, to which his answers, in rapid, unselfconscious English, were polite but brief. I told myself he didn't need to hear all this, but I was shy of bringing the interview round to the question of Marcel; in the end all he said was that the boy had never known the brief glad hours of childhood, or some such phrase, perhaps a quotation. Paternal love, watchful and removed, as I had known it and lost it myself, showed through for a moment. He saw he didn't need to tell me my behaviour had been ill judged and over-severe—I made an unsolicited promise to be kind to Marcel, and over supper beamed at him and joked in a way he seemed to find quite sinister after my earlier toughness. I didn't know if it was quite tactful to say to Echevin: "Marcel tells me he's not an admirer of Orst's work." It might have been a matter of contention between them. "No," he replied crisply. "But there are other things in life than the works of Orst. And besides, they are not calculated to appeal to children. A taste for the femme fatale comes later; if at all." Over the course of the meal a mild counter-argument to the effect that a boy of sixteen was no longer a child had been forming in my mind, and when I ran back to the romantic poseur I had been at the same age I thought I saw someone who would have revelled in Orst's private purgatory. "I think they're really depressing," said Marcel with a grin which showed this was a permitted house-heresy. After supper, which left me feeling stuffed and clumsy, Echevin called me through to his workroom, while Marcel, to emphasise how they were keeping their side of the bargain, was sent to study his verbs. The poor kid came tolerantly in with Knowles's English Grammar, which he stuck under my nose and tapped before climbing on to the sofa and mouthing vacantly to himself, like a tiny child rehearsing imaginary friends. When we came back twenty minutes later he was leaning sideways and wheezily asleep.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A string of modest villas, bungalows with lawns running down to the dunes. An air of mild neglect—scabbing stucco, rusted house names, woody buddleia breaking through the garden fences. An air of between-the-wars, of chic whiteness and empty space and cocktails on the glassy-screened terraces with sunset views across the Channel. And of being in a place now forlornly unchic, a little colony half-abandoned to encroachments of sand and wiry grass. We pottered along past the ten or twelve houses to the end of the road, where there was a small concrete car-park looking out over the sands like a gun-emplacement. A few new vehicles were waiting there beside a derelict and plundered Ami, and down the beach a few figures could be seen. Were the Three amongst them, intimately corralled in one of those striped wind-breaks, or careering down to the shock of the sea? We turned again, and drove back, and it was only going this way that I caught sight of KYF, tucked in a rose-tangled carport, the carport of. . . Les Goélands. I was now virtually on the floor of Matt's jeep and urged him to go on. He pulled up in the next entrance-way and asked me just what it was I wanted to do and why we were here. He wasn't angry but he was used to getting results; he wasn't imaginative; he wasn't shocked by the whims and oddities of others—the odder the better, as I was coming to realise—but he needed an objective. It was hard to explain that I just wanted to be here, just wanted to see the house. "So we're going to spy on them." "Well, how can we? If I go on the beach I'll be recognised." Matt disregarded this. "But you want to see him stripped out. You want to know what's going on with Les Trois"—he took on my term without a flutter—"and whether your kid's fucking with the girl or the boy. Or both." "Or neither." It was not unhumbling to have it so spelt out. "You must remember I've never seen any of these guys. They'd better be good." I sat feeling wretched for a while, bruised by my alliance with someone so alien and unsuitable as Matt. Then he turned off the engine and jumped out. The entrance-way we were in was overhung with sprawling trees; the gate, meshed against dogs, sagged under a heavy chain. Inside, clumps of cupressus had been allowed to grow and grow, and obscured the house; their young tops swayed in the breeze. I watched Matt leaning at the gate, his polo-shirt hanging out. Then he scrambled over smartly, showing a white quarter of naked back, and disappeared down the driveway. I stayed where I was, at last confident of disaster.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "actually I think it may have been a mistake—or he was arrested and died anyway. He was old and I think extremely ill. It was just before we were liberated," she said with a somehow comically offhand identification with that earlier generation and that deep event: "Paul would have been about eighteen." I thought, if this was the Second World War, what would Luc be doing? I didn't know yet if he was merely a follower, subtly institutionalised by his St Narcissus training, or if his breaking away showed some more decisive and unstable quality, the inexplicable gift of shaping his own life, as he was shaping mine. When Paul took up with the blind old painter, he was a boy, he might have been someone that someone like me might have taught; and he was making a life-decision—no one knew at the time, perhaps it was mildly worrying to his parents who condoned the charitable impulse but regarded the artist in his eccentric villa with superstitious unease. Who could say? But if he hadn't recognised that necessity, well, I wouldn't have been perched on this canal-side railing now. It was an oddly satisfying few minutes, under the great wrecked chestnuts, looking back at the gables and towers and the evening lamps, and seeing how Paul's altruism and Luc's wild truancy fed into the empty vortex of my own life. "I'm quite envious of you working upstairs," Helene said, with a little gasped laugh at her own candour. "I won't always, you know. When you're not there I'm going to be on the front desk, with the Meredith." "Well, we'll see." "It would be nice if we could both be upstairs," I said courteously, masking my new sense of disquiet that I might have taken a job from her and that this little stroll was being used by her to let me know. "You know so much more about it all than me." "Well, I wouldn't be useless. It's not that I really warm to the paintings themselves, just that I seem to have known them all my life. It's Paul's direct connection with them—it makes me a little proprietorial about them in my turn." She stood off a pace or two and we went on, through an archway under a lamp that gave it the look of a convent or a hospital and through a chain of silent courtyards so obliquely linked with dog-leg alleys that in each one it seemed we had gone wrong and had come to the end. "What did you think of Orst's pictures when you were a girl?" I said, quick-marching for a moment to keep up.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Courts have ordered infants into several weeklong stays away from the primary parent. Over the first year of life the baby needs access to the primary care-giver, whether mother or father, as often as possible, especially at times of stress, which is often during the night when she wakes with a tummy-ache, or because she is hungry, or because of the many complicated parts of the child’s environment to which the baby needs to adjust. The role of the primary caregiver is to provide a steady base of security by consistently and predictably responding to the baby’s needs. During the second year, a toddler relying on this solid base of security is ready to venture out and explore the world. It’s okay to try the playground slide because the safest lap you know is waiting at the bottom to catch you. The child’s interest in the world, her capacity for learning, and her cognitive, emotional, and social development rest on her sense of a solid base. Very few studies have looked at infants and toddlers who visit overnight in the other parent’s home. One very important study at our center carried out by Dr. Judith Soloman shows that these very young children are exquisitely sensitive to the relationship between their divorced parents. 8 If the parents are angry or unable to cooperate or communicate well with each other, the children show disorganized attachment to both, meaning that they don’t trust either mommy or daddy as protective figures. They feel insecure everywhere. If the parents are able to cooperate, talk about the child’s care together and to exchange the baby peaceably, the baby may thrive. But even though some parents may try to ease the young child into feeling comfortable in two homes, let’s face a hard truth. When a marriage fails in the last trimester of pregnancy or a few months after the birth of a child, the man and woman are likely to be hurt and angry. When a court orders overnight visits in these situations, I doubt very much that many parents are able to cooperate about the details of the child’s feeding or sleeping or what to do about colic. They are very distressed, sometimes distraught people. When I’m consulted on what to do about custody of babies I advocate creating a postdivorce environment that’s as close as possible to life in a good intact home. The baby should have a chance to form his earliest relationships within a stable environment, to have a sense of a solid routine and predictable care. If the parents can work this out, they can surely consider overnights in the two houses and carefully observe the child’s response. Parents often need help in overcoming their fear that the baby will not be safe in the care of the other parent.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There had also been the hope originally, since CORE is by now a dirty word in Tallahassee, of getting broader commu nity support by asking the ministers of all faiths to give the news to their congregations and urge them to join the stu dents. It was possible to gauge the depth of official hostility and community apathy by the discussion this suggestion pre cipitated. OTHER ESSAYS One of the Negro students suggested that not all the min isters were to be trusted; one of them would surely tccl it his duty to warn the police. A white coed student protested this vehemently, it being her view that there was no possible harm in an open prayer meeting-"lt's just a y'all-come prayer meeting!"-and refused to believe that the police would not protect such spectacular piety. And this brought up the whole question of strategy: If the police were not warned, then the prayer meeting would have to be described as spontaneous. "But you can't," said a Negro coed, "decide to have a spon taneous prayer meeting. Especially not on the steps of the Capitol on Thursday at one o'clock." "Oh, it'll be sponta neous enough," said another student-my notes do not in dicate his color-"by the time we start praying." D., a white coed, was against informing the police: "We love them dearly," she said with rather heavy sarcasm, "but I don't want them to get the impression that I'm asking their permission to do anything." "We're not asking their permission," said another white student. "We have every right to have prayer meeting and we're just informing them of it." "There's no reason," said the girl who felt that the police would not pos sibly do anything to peacefully praying people, "for them not to treat us just like they'd treat any other group of citizens." This led to rather cynical laughter and someone, looking around the room, otlcred to name "oh, about twenty-five multicolored reasons." In all this there was no question of tear of the police; there was simply no belief whatever that they would act impartially or "that they might turn out," as Reverend Steele unconvincingly suggested, "to protect us." It is significant, I think, that none of the students, except for one lone girl-who turned out to be the daughter of a seg regationist and who was therct(>re in a way defending her futher against the imputation of villainy-believed that they could call on the police tor protection. It was t< >r this reason that it was decided not to ask the city's ministers to invite their congregations.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was nearly two o’clock. A taxi came slowly past, its yellow light burning—and then just behind it a yellow Cortina, with tinted windows and the wheel-arches flared out over gigantic customised tyres. It came almost to a stop at the entrance to the Club and as I walked up quite fast a thick-set black man stepped out from the pink glow of the doorway, the car’s rear door was flung open for him as a voice inside said, ‘Come on, Harold.’ Then the door slammed, and the car surged away past me and down the street. I saw its bank of rear lights glare on as it braked at the crossroads, and then it swung to the right and was gone. Perhaps only the drink enabled me to sleep, tucked in behind Phil, my hand on his heart. I woke feeling cold, even so, pulled a sheet over us without waking him, and curled back again into the same body-warmed space. But I couldn’t sleep now, and as the incident with Arthur flared up over and over in my mind my heart would race and thump against Phil’s back in panicky counterpoint to the dreamless slowness of his own pulse. I got up about six and moped around in my dressing-gown, the very dressing-gown that Arthur had liked to wear, maroon, full-length, shabby, stained and cordless after its school career, and which had hung so poignantly, threadbare and exclusive with memory, on his young shoulders or tumbled open about his sprawling thighs. I had the feeling I was imitating him as I made tea: it was something he was always doing, the only domestic thing he could do. He had made tea as if it were instinctual to him, unasked, uncomplaining … I took a mug of it to the drawing-room and lay on the sofa with my eyes open, thinking. There was a section of Charles’s diary I had been reading, and I picked it off the floor and made myself concentrate on it again. May 26, 1926: At Talodi there were complaints, a dispute over two water jars (both parties seemed equally implausible, so it was a doubtful decision, I fear) & a girl with a septic foot. There are many more of these medical problems this time, several shot-gun wounds in the legs, mysteriously—but the Nuba will hang on to their ancient firearms, & there seems little we can do about it. After what has been done to them they deserve some means of self-defence. Today those things in Palme’s book were constantly in my mind, the terrible stories of slavery, mutilation, castration: how they weighed the boys down with sandbags, razored off their balls & patched them up with—melted butter, I think it was.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I flipped about through the notebooks, picking on odd sentences, getting caught for a paragraph, but feeling irritated, almost piqued by the way the life in them went parochially on. I suppose I expected them to fall open at the dirty bits, but they were discreet enough to fall open at records of duties, quarrels with officials, guest-lists for parties. More than that, I expected there to be dirty bits, and the slightly repellent introduction to the trivia of colonial existence gave me sudden doubts. It was the awful sense of another life having gone on and on, and the self-importance it courted by being written down and enduring years later, that made me think frigidly that I wasn’t the man for it. It was really the present which reassured me. Charles’s life now was so incoherent, such a mixture of fatigue and obsessive, vehement energy, of knowing subtlety and juvenile broadness, of presence and absence, that he gave me the hope which the books withheld. The more recent incident at his house, for instance, was excellent copy. From what I could gather, he had been locked in the dressing-room by Lewis, not as a punishment but to protect him, and prevent him from interfering while Lewis fought with another man in the bedroom. This man was a previous employee. I asked Charles why he had come to the house, and rather guessed that he had been invited as a possible replacement for Lewis. Lewis, as I already knew, was a model of jealousy, and I could easily imagine his slothful, sarcastic violence breaking out if his pitch was queered. Yet if he had fought for his devotion to Charles, why had he then attacked him through the schoolboy voodoo of the effigy? Like all the other miscellaneous symptoms, it made sense to Charles himself. He castigated himself after he woke up and we went down to the kitchen and made tea. ‘It was bound to happen,’ he felt. But he was unable to explain it to me. ‘Lewis was a damn good scrapper,’ he said several times. The phone rang. When I answered it, a formal and affected voice said, ‘Is that William?’ ‘Speaking.’ ‘I have Lord Beckwith on the line for you.’ Some thirty seconds elapsed before my grandfather picked up the receiver. He had become so very grand that he commanded servants to do even the simplest things for him. His butler was an efficient, humourless man, almost as old as himself, one of a race virtually extinct, stifled by their own correctness. He would never, one felt, have locked his employer in his dressing-room. This was the first time, though, that he had been commissioned to dial my number, and I felt that slight anxious remoteness that thousands must have experienced during my grandfather’s life in government and the law.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Nevertheless I learn that he is from a Florida town not very far away, has a sister but is the only son of very modestly situated people, is studying here on a scholarship and intends to become a bacteriologist. There is also about him something extremely difficult to describe because, while all of us have been there, no one wishes to remember it: the really agonizing privacy of the very young. They are only be ginning to realize that the world is difficult and dangerous, that they arc, themselves, tormentingly complex and that the years that stretch before them promise to be more dangerous than the years that arc behind. And they always seem to be wrestling, in a private chamber to which no grownup has ac cess, with monumental decisions. Everyone laughs at himself once he has come through this THEY CAN ' T TURN BACK 629 storm, but it is borne in on me, suddenly, that it is a storm, a storm, moreover, that not everyone survives and through which no one comes unscathed. Decisions made at this time always seem and, in fact, nearly always turn out to be decisions that determine the course and quality of a life. I wonder for the first time what it can be like to be making, in the adoles cent dark, such decisions as this generation of students has made. They are in battle with more things than can be named. Not only must they summon up the force to face the law and the lawless-who are not, right now in Tallahassee, easily dis tinguishable-or the prospect of jail or the possibility of being maimed or killed; they are also dealing with problems yet more real, more dangerous and more personal than these: who they are, what they want, how they are to achieve what they want and how they are to reconcile their responsibilities to their parents with their responsibilities to themselves. Add to this exams; the peculiar difficulty of studying at all in so electric a situation; the curious demoralization that can occur in a youngster who is unable to respect his college president; and the enormous questions that, however dealt with or sup pressed, must live in the mind of a student who is already, legally, a convict and is on a year's probation. These are all very serious matters, made the more serious by the fact that the students have so few models to emulate. The young grow up by watching and imitating their elders-it is their universal need to be able to revere them; but I submit that in this country today it is quite impossible for a young person to be speeded toward his maturity in this way.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it-at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change. Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it be comes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that anv Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educa tio nal system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. H � ianc � o t � flag which_g � .!l t�' � e � par�try in which anyone can become President, and so fo rth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that-h� h� ri � � �.2I � tbing_t.g_0:ili_�!i.Qn-that his past is nothing more than a record of b..@J.i.liation.s gladly_e u�! u�d.' He is assured by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only-his de vOfiOilto whtte peopTC. - IfyoiJ-think - Tam -exaggerat i ng, ex amine th e myths \ vfuc h proliferate in t � is country about Negroes. _::i_i <:· �-. • ' "' -·· · Now all this enters the child's consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be tooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don't have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his fa ther is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or 680 OTHER ESSAYS mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents' shoulders which menaces him.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Babies vary greatly in their capacity to deal with change. As the child grows older, parents can increase the time he spends in each home. The child who is happily attached to one parent is able to deal more happily and easily with the other parent and with other caregivers. Putting the child’s best interests forward and honoring what is best for the child is extremely hard to do in many postdivorce families. It requires parents to stand apart from their raw, hurt, jealous, competetive feelings and take an objective, compassionate look at what life will be like for their child. Not every parent can do that, but surely the job of the court is to give priority to the helpless child over the demands of the parent. How Older Children Cope with Joint Custody W HAT ABOUT THE school-aged child? Can all children handle living in two homes? Can everyone deal with two sets of friends and the need to engage in activities that don’t conflict with their parents’ schedules? Obviously there are differences among children that affect their capacity to deal flexibly with changes in daily life. The chief job of the school-age child is to learn at school and to develop socially. For this reason, the child’s personality and temperament need to be carefully considered in making custody plans. People are born with different levels of reactivity and arousal, a basic difference in neurological “hard wiring” stays with us through our lives. Some children adjust easily to change and transition, indeed, some seek it out and thrive on it. Others have a much harder time accepting change. It stresses their neurological system and it takes them longer to get used to it. Translating these basic differences into the school and social arenas of children, it follows that kids for whom transition is harder need more protection so that transitions don’t interfere with learning and making friends. Some children can spend the weekend with one parent and be dropped off at school Monday morning without missing a beat. Other kids with more sensitive temperaments are not able to do any of this unless they’ve had a day or at least an evening to readjust. Without a transitional day for reentry they fall behind in school and in play. As we saw in Racer’s story, school-aged kids can also become deeply involved in after-school activities such as sports, music, or gymnastics, to name a few. Friendships as well as ability and talent are fostered through participation in these activities. As children try different activities and schedules change, conflicts with custody arrangements are inevitable. Invitations to friends’ birthday parties, playdates, and outings with other families don’t fall neatly into established time-sharing schedules.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  have never felt the breeze before. Her ass, her crotch, each nip ple, seem to braid together into a rope twisting deep into her stomach, twining around itself, a noose that will remain for ever inside her. “Jailbait,” he says, kissing her belly button. Years from now, Eddie Fish will be a gynecologist in Scars dale. He will drive a Volvo, own an espresso maker, be the fa ther of two daughters of his own—two daughters he would kill if he ever found them in the woods with a man resembling his younger self. But today, as he lights a joint and places it in Jennie’s mouth, he is not focused on his future, the bright golden-boy future that unfurls before him like an heirloom rug. He has no doubts, no fears. His medical school degree is at the framers, his internship in the city will begin in just a few weeks, and Lisa Wallach is finally a thing of the past. And here is Jennie, the beautiful neighborhood kid with the crush on him, Jennie, twelve years younger than he—sixteen, for chrissake—three years ago he had attended her Bat Mitzvah! His eyes travel over her shoulders, down her breasts, lower to the blond depths of her. A virgin? He doubted it. She had written him letters all through medical school, letters so steamy he and Lisa had read them to each other late at night. He stubs out the joint on a tree trunk, next to a carved heart with no names, no initials inside it. Gently, he lays her down on a bed of leaves, her head resting against the root of a tree. She crosses her legs, her arms, trying to cover herself. She has no idea how sexy she is. He quickly pulls his polo shirt over his head, undoes his own shorts and steps out

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘You see, I didn’t know until today that you even knew him.’ ‘I didn’t even know until yesterday that you did.’ He did not smile, and I suspected some slight friction, or horripilation of jealousy like that of the cattily possessive Lewis. ‘He knows a huge number of people,’ he said more tolerantly. ‘How did you get caught up with him?’ It seemed disloyal to tell the truth so I said simply that I had met him at the Corry. ‘He doesn’t go there very often these days,’ said Bill, as if to imply that in that case I had been exceptionally lucky. ‘No, it was fortunate. The thing is, Bill, I would value your help—what you know about him. I would acknowledge it of course in the book.’ He appeared satisfied by this. ‘I suspect you may be a leading witness.’ ‘You make it sound like a trial or something,’ said Bill. I picked up my beer and looked at him interrogatively. ‘Do you want me to tell you now?’ he asked, clearly uncertain, as I was, about how biographers worked. ‘Not now,’ I smiled. ‘But I’d like it if we could get together soon. You’re not touching your drink.’ ‘I’m sorry, Will. I’d like to in a way, but I think with the mood I’m in tonight it wouldn’t be a good thing. It’s never a good thing, to be honest, when I go back on the booze. Somehow it always lands me in trouble.’ Looking at his ungainly muscularity, I wondered if it nursed and suppressed an instinct for violence. Perhaps his self-denial had been painfully learnt, and was the clue to a double life whose difficult side was all in the past.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Nevertheless, as I learned from talking with both of her parents, she was the soul of discretion. When she was fourteen, she explained to me, “I have two different lives. Everybody is happier this way. They have different expectations. Mom lets me do more of what I want. She has few rules. She understands me more. Dad expects a lot more, especially in schoolwork. He and my stepmother are into table manners and formal dinners. My parents still don’t get along. My dad and stepmother really hate my mom. They would tell her how much they hate her except for me. I keep them apart. You see, my mom is pretty isolated. She would like a relationship with my dad and stepmother but there is nothing there for her. I don’t want her to find out what they really think. So I keep it cool and I always, always watch what I say. And we manage.” This was the first inkling I had that the “don’t fight” rule had limitations. In their behavior, Lisa’s parents had had the most civilized divorce of all the couples in the study. If parents got grades for how they handled divorce and the postdivorce years, these people would have earned an A plus. There was no open fighting during the marriage and there was almost none after it ended. An only child, Lisa continued to see both parents in ways that felt fair and equitable to everyone. Sometimes her father and stepmother babysat her in her mother’s home, which remained her primary residence. Both parents were devoted to their daughter. Money was adequate in both homes and included college support and vacation trips. Although her mother and stepmother experienced the kinds of ongoing tensions I just described, there was never any open conflict. Neither woman expected Lisa to take sides and both went out of their way not to criticize any family member. But there are things that adults cannot hide from children. Continuing tensions between ex-partners and stepparents are conveyed directly to children via countless nonverbal signals. A roll of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders, an edge in the voice are enough to tell any child the truth—these adults are getting along on my behalf but they’re pretending. Lisa grew up aware of their intense enduring anger and her mother’s hurt. Good intentions can always become undermined by the frailties of human nature and its passions. Except for her continued worry about her mother and an occasional mother’s “boyfriend who drives me up the wall,” Lisa enjoyed her adolescence. Unlike children living under strict court-ordered visiting schedules, she had lots of choices about what she could do and when. Her father called her every week to arrange what they would do, according to her preferences—which included not seeing him if other activities were more desirable.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I think you should come on Friday,’ he said. Then: ‘Who knows, I may be dead by Friday. Perhaps better make it tomorrow—I should still be quick then.’ It was a bizarre usage, which it took me a second or two to see; I had a fleeting image of him chasing me round a huge mahogany table. ‘Well, that would be very nice.’ ‘Nice for me, William,’ he insisted. It seemed to be settled in his mind, and he wandered away holding his towel in front of him as though he expected to bump into something. I had to seek him out when I had finished dressing, to enquire which Club it was and what name would find him. At home it was always very hot; the central heating throbbed away as if we feared exposure, and often, though high up and not overlooked, we kept the curtains drawn in the daytime, only a mild bloom of pinkish light penetrating into the rooms from outside. The creation of this climate was barely conscious, as people in crisis habitually transform their surroundings, the miserable sitting cold through the dusk without turning lights on, and the endangered, like Arthur and I, craving rosiness and security. The penumbra helped us to hide from each other. As soon as the new terms were forced upon us by Arthur’s coming back he must have felt as much as I did a sinking of the heart at our incompatibility. Inflicted with this new anxiety, we were afraid to annoy or burden each other. He spent much of the time asleep or sitting in a chair; and he bathed long and often. Very young and worried, he seemed to fear my resentment, and his gestures towards me took on a nervous respect; I would go to the dining-room and read alone, and he would come in with a cup of tea and touch me on the arm. If I had not been so fiercely and sexually in love with him, these days would have been utterly intolerable. And even so there were spells of repugnance, both at him and at my own susceptibility. Sex took on an almost purgative quality, as if after hours of inertia and evasion we could burn off our unspoken fears in vehement, wordless activity. Sex came to justify his presence there, to confirm that we were not just two strangers trapped together by a fateful mistake.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  But we did have our suspicions. We had been contacted by a white man who seemed intensely interested in the case. He would call wanting to talk at length about what we were investigating. He would hint at having information that could help us, but he was coy and slow to share anything concrete. He repeatedly told us that he knew that McMillian was innocent and he would help us prove it. Eventually, after several calls and hours of conversation, he claimed to know where the murder weapon, which had never been recovered, might be located. We tried to get as much information out of him as we could. We also checked his background. He told us that he’d had some conflicts with another man in town and that the more he talked the more he blamed this other man for the shooting death of Morrison. When we investigated this theory, we weren’t impressed. The other man didn’t match the eyewitness descriptions of the person seen leaving the cleaners, and he didn’t have our caller’s history of stalking, violence against women, and preoccupation with the Morrison murder. We began to think that our caller could be the person who had murdered Ronda Morrison. We had dozens of phone conversations with him and even met him a couple of times. We were less and less convinced that the man he was accusing of committing the crime was involved. At some point we asked him some direct questions about where he was on the day of the murder, which must have alarmed him because we heard from him less often after that. Before I could tell any of this to the ABI investigators, Taylor said, “We think you may have interviewed our suspect and may have collected a good bit of information from this guy. We were hoping you might allow us to have access to that information and those interviews.” He named our suspect. I told them we would give them access to the information we had collected. None of it was protected by attorney-client privilege; we had never represented this man or obtained anything confidentially. I told Taylor and Cole to give us a few days to organize the information, and then we would turn it over. “We want to get Walter out of prison as soon as possible,” I insisted. “Well, I think the attorney general and the lawyers would like to maintain the status quo for a few more months, until we can make an arrest of the actual killer.” “Right, but you do understand that the status quo is a problem for us? Walter has been on death row for nearly six years for a crime he didn’t commit.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I sat on the sandy shore and watched the brilliant white pelicans gliding effortlessly over the still waters in search of food. Small fiddler crabs scurried around me, too fearful to get close but curious enough to linger nearby. I thought about Walter making his way back to Holman, shackled in the back of the van again. I wanted him to be hopeful but grounded enough to manage whatever the court decided. I thought about his family and all the people who had come to court. They’d kept the faith through the five years that had passed since Walter was first arrested, and now they had cause to feel energized and encouraged. I thought about Mrs. Williams. She had come up to me after the hearings and had given me a sweet kiss on the cheek. I told her how happy I was she’d come back to court. She looked at me playfully. “Attorney Stevenson, you know I was going to be here, and you know I wasn’t going to let these people keep me out.” Her words had made me smile. Michael got out of the water looking worried. “What did you see?” I joked. “Shark? Eel? Poisonous jellyfish? Stingray? Piranha?” He was out of breath. “They’ve threatened us, lied to us, there are people who have told us that some folks in the county are so unnerved by what we’re doing that they’re going to kill us. What do you think they’re going to do now that they know how much evidence we have to prove Walter’s innocence?” I had given this some thought, too. Our opponents had done everything they could to frame Walter—in order to kill him. They’d lied to us and subverted the judicial process. More than a few people had passed on to us that they’d heard angry people in the community make threats on our lives because they believed we were trying to help a guilty murderer get off death row. “I don’t know,” I told Michael, “but we have to press on, man, we have to press on.” We both sat there in silence, watching the sun fade into darkness. More fiddler crabs emerged from their holes, scurrying crazily and getting closer to where we sat. I turned to Michael in the approaching darkness. “We should go.” Chapter Ten [image file=image_rsrc32V.jpg] MitigationAmerica’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been largely fueled by misguided drug policy and excessive sentencing, but the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment. It’s created unprecedented problems.