What I Loved

chin to his chest. "You'd think that if you really love your child, these things couldn't happen." He looked up at me, his eyes fierce. "How did this happen?"
    I couldn't answer him.
    Dr. Monk was a short plump woman with frizzy gray hair, a soft voice, and economical gestures. She began the interview with a simple statement. "I'm going to tell you what I told Mr. and Mrs. Wechsler. Children like Mark are difficult to cure. It's very hard to get through to them. After a while, their parents usually give up on them, and they go out into the world alone, where they either pull themselves together, land in prison, or die."
    Her bluntness shocked me. Prison. Death. I muttered something about trying to help him. He was still young, still young.
    "It's possible," she said, "that his personality isn't fixed yet. You understand that Mark's problems are characterological."
    Yes, I thought. It's a question of character. Such an old word—character.
    I talked about my anger, about feeling betrayed and the uncanny effect of Mark's charm. I mentioned the fire and the doughnuts. Through the window in the room I could see a small tree that had begun to leaf. The broken knots on its long branches would later become large blooms. I had forgotten the name of the tree. I looked at it in silence after telling her about the friendship between Matt and Mark and continued to stare at it, searching for its identity as though its name were important. Then it came to me: hydrangea.
    "You know," I said to her, "I think that before his death, Matthew withdrew from Mark. When I remember it now, they were very quiet with each other in the car on the way to camp, and then in the middle of the ride, Matt said loudly, 'Stop pinching me.' It seemed so ordinary then—boys irritating each other." The pinch led to the bite, and when I finished the story, Dr. Monk raised her eyebrows and her eyes sharpened.
    She didn't say anything about the bite, and I kept talking. "I told Mark about my father's family," I said. "I hardly remember them. I never even met my cousins. They died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. My Uncle David survived, the lager but died during the march out of the camp. I told him about my father's death from a stroke. When he listened to me, his face was so serious. I think there might have been tears in his eyes ..."
    "It isn't something that you tell many people."
    I shook my head and looked at the hydrangea tree. I felt lost to myself at that moment, as though another person were speaking. I kept my eyes on the tree, and there was something red in my mind, very red through a window.
    "Do you know why you chose to tell Mark?"
    I turned to her and shook my head.
    "Did you tell Matthew?"
    My voice shook. "I told Mark much more. Matt was only eleven when he died."
    "Eleven is very young," she said gently.
    I began to nod, and then I wept. I cried in front of a woman I didn't know at all. After I left her, I wiped my face in her small neat bathroom with its bountiful supply of Kleenex and imagined all the people who had been there before me, wiping away their tears and snot beside the toilet. When I walked outside the building on Central Park West, I looked across at the trees that had burst into full leaf and had a sensation of ineffable strangeness. Being alive is inexplicable, I thought Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.
    A week later, Mark signed a contract in front of me, Violet, and Bill. The document was Dr. Monk's idea. I think she hoped that by agreeing to conditions laid down in black-and-white, Mark would be drawn into an understanding that morality is finally a social contract, a consensus about basic human laws, and that without it, relations among people degenerate into chaos. The paper read like an abbreviated, individualized version of the Ten Commandments:
    I will not lie.
    I will not steal.
    I will not leave the house without permission.
    I will not talk on the telephone without permission.
    I will repay in full the money I stole from Leo out of my allowance money, the money I will earn this summer, next year, and into the future.
    I still have my copy among my papers. At the bottom is Mark's signature scrawled in a childish hand.
    Every Saturday throughout the summer, Mark arrived at my door with his payment. I didn't want him in my apartment, so he remained in the hallway while he opened the envelope and counted the bills into my hand. After he was gone, I recorded the amount in a