Free Kramer vs. Kramer by Avery Corman Page A

Ted and Joanna had gone to Fort Lauderdale to see Dora and Harold Kramer’s new condominium, a garden apartment near a pool. While Harold watched television, Dora took them on a tour of the grounds. “This is my younger son, Ted, and his wife,” she would say. Sons were identified poolside by occupation, daughters and daughters-in-law by their husbands’ occupations. “Ted sells,” she said, but she never mentioned that he sold advertising space, since she was still not wholly clear what that was. He would have been easier to explain if he were a big liquor wholesaler like his brother, as in “This is my older son, Ralph, he’s a big liquor wholesaler,” or a doctor like the Simons’ boy.
    “W HAT HAVE YOU BEEN doing up there?”
    “Breaking up a marriage.”
    “I never heard of such a thing.”
    “It’s very modern.”
    “Who permits such a thing?”
    “Ted?” His father had left his game show on television, having delayed to make certain this was important enough to come to the phone.
    “How are you, Dad?”
    “You let your wife leave you?”
    “The decision was not democratically arrived at.”
    “And she left the little baby. Ahhh!”
    He howled. The shame of this must have been enormous. He had never heard his father howl his mother’s howl before.
    “I’ve got everything under control.”
    “Control?” his mother shrieked. “How can everything be under control?”
    “Mom, listen—”
    “Your wife has run away from you—”
    “I’ve hired a housekeeper, a terrific woman. She’s raised her own boy, she’s taken care of other children.”
    “What is she?” she said quickly.
    “Uh … Polish.”
    “Good. They work hard. Ahh, what’s the difference? It’s a tragedy, a disgrace.”
    “She’s very nice. She’s going to come in every day and take care of everything.”
    “A disgrace. That woman. She’s a tramp. A tramp!”
    “Mom, Joanna is probably a lot of things, some of them I don’t even know myself. But a tramp,” he said, trying to stifle his laughter. “How do you get a tramp out of this?”
    “A tramp,” she said definitively.
    “A slut,” his father added for emphasis.
    He had tried to make it neat. It was not neat enough. When he hung up he was still chuckling at how they possibly got a tramp and slut out of it.
    S HE CALLED HIM WILLIAM; he called her Mrs. Willewska. Ted called her Mrs. Willewska also; she called him Mr. Kramer, the formality appealing to Ted, as if they were an old-line family like the Kennedys, accustomed to having help. She was a gentle, reasonable woman, intuitive with a child. For Billy, his mommy gone forever was still an unfathomable idea. What was real to him were the details of his life, who brings me to school, who picks me up, who makes me lunch, when do I watch TV, who makes me supper, who does what Mommy did? These were tangible, and the possibility that these would be unpredictable was frightening to him. His mother’s absence did not mean his world had come apart. No one to give him a peanut butter sandwich did. During the search for a housekeeper, these were Billy’s concerns, which he verbalized with nervous questions about times of arrivals and departures for school, for dates, for meals—who does what, who stands where? As soon as Etta Willewska arrived, the unfathomable continued to be so—no Mommy? All else, however, was answered. Mrs. Willewska did that. Within a few days, Billy was saying, “Daddy, Mrs. Willewska said I could not have another cookie. I had one before.” On a morning when Ted walked along with them to take Billy to school, Ted began to step off the curb, only to be admonished: “It says don’t walk, Daddy.”
    “We only cross when it says walk, Mr. Kramer. So he’ll learn.”
    “Right.” Take me by the hand, Mrs. Willewska, and cross me.
    She had brought stability to them. They were both, at the core, still bewildered. But on the details, on the peanut butter sandwiches and the walks and don’t