Shame

step on Anna’s memory. She let her sit there and think about fonder days.
    “I still have that leaf,” Anna said.
    “Were you shocked to learn who Caleb’s father was?”
    Anna shook her head. “It was almost as if I expected that, or something like that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “With Caleb there was always this...darkness. He had places in him that no light could penetrate. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself very well, but there is this shadowy side, this sense of tragedy, that Cal always carries around with him. I wanted to help ease that burden, but he made it his alone. For most of our marriage I went to him. I’d massage his neck and shoulders, and then I’d sit on his lap and ask him what was wrong, and he’d tell me that nothing was wrong. I always knew he was lying. I knew there were secrets, things he wasn’t sharing with me, but over time I began to accept his distance, and then I began to participate in it.”
    “You make him sound as if he was never happy.”
    “Happiness makes him feel guilty, as if he doesn’t deserve it.”
    “Are you angry at him for not confiding in you?”
    “Yes. But now I can understand how he thought he was doing the right thing.”
    “Did you have a whirlwind courtship?”
    Anna shook her head. “No. We fell in love right away, but it was a year before Cal asked me to marry him. And when he finally did ask me, I could see how conflicted he was. At the timeI thought it was just a guy thing. I only saw him that torn up two other times.”
    “What happened on those occasions?”
    “When he learned I was pregnant with Janet, Cal wanted me to get an abortion. For a time he was adamant. ‘It’s a bad world,’ he kept telling me. ‘It’s not a fit place to bring a child into.’ But I told him, ‘If a child is loved, the world isn’t so terrible.’ He kept coming back to me with his what-ifs, though. His favorite was, ‘What if the baby’s deformed? What if the baby isn’t right?’ He was terrified of that. I think he had the same fears with James, but by then he was head-over-heels in love with Janet, so he wasn’t quite as terrified.”
    “What happened the other time he was upset?”
    “Nothing really. It was so long ago....”
    “I’d still like to hear about it.”
    “I guess I remember it so vividly because it’s the only time I ever saw Cal cry.”
    “What happened?”
    “Cal was taking some junior college courses to please me. I had nagged him for what I thought was his own good. He was so smart, I couldn’t imagine him not excelling in, and enjoying, college.
    “At first, everything seemed to be going fine, but one night I walked into the study and I found him sobbing. He tried to explain his tears away by saying he was just tired, but as I comforted him he opened up a little. He said he’d been reading something that bothered him. I didn’t pry; I knew better than that. I just held him, rocking him in my arms, and that’s when he opened up a little more. At the time it was hard making sense of what he said. He told me that his psychology class was studying nature-versus-nurture, and that he felt doomed either way. ‘My whole life’s been a Harlow experiment,’ he said, and then he stopped talking, sealing himself up again. I kneaded his shoulders, and chest, but he wouldn’t say anything else.
    “I made him some cocoa and told him he needed a good night’s sleep. We went to bed, and we made love. I used to think I could take all of Cal’s troubles and make them explode between my legs. Eventually he slept, but I didn’t. Maybe I always counted on him being Cal the stoic, and maybe I’m partly to blame for the way he’s acted over the years. I don’t know. I only remember feeling that my world was a less secure place.
    “I went downstairs in the middle of the night, and I saw that he’d left his psychology textbook open. I sat and started reading about Dr. Harry Harlow and his awful experiments with rhesus monkeys.”
    “What kind of experiments?”
    “He deprived young monkeys of their mothers and set up all sorts of artificial mother substitutes, but Harlow’s mothers weren’t designed for love. They looked like something created in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. These were
mothers
who shot jets of compressed air at the baby monkeys that tried desperately to cling to them, air that almost separated their fur from their skin; these were
mothers
that rocked violently, bucking the babies to the