The Love Children Page 10

  “Good heavens, why not?”

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  Now she was really curious. “What is it, Fi?”

  “She wouldn’t give me a recipe to give you,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  His teeth barely moved. “She thinks you’re a bad woman.”

  “Oh.” I could see that many things became clear for my mother in that instant. Her brow clouded.

  Philo watched her miserably. “I’m sorry, Andy. She’s old-fashioned.”

  “So that’s why we haven’t met your family,” she said. Her mouth was tight.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “No.”

  Mom burst out laughing then, and I breathed out.

  In the spring of 1971, a lot of bad things happened. In March we found out about the My Lai massacre. It had happened a couple of years before, and some people had known about it earlier, but most of us found out about it then. The military was blaming a soldier named Calley. I felt bad for him: maybe he had been a killer that day, but that’s what he’d been trained to do—he was just a boy who had been turned into a weapon, doing what his superiors told him to do. He wasn’t like Eichmann, an educated man with connections who would know how to transfer himself out of an untenable situation. He was a grunt. Killing those people certainly hadn’t been his own idea. My friends and I thought there should be a court somewhere to put the president, the head of the army, the secretary of defense, and the secretary of state on trial. Everybody was disgusted with the war and with our leaders, but no one seemed to think we could do anything about them.

  Nixon was ordering a lot of bombing and there was a protest in Washington by soldiers who had fought in Vietnam. Men who had been acclaimed heroes threw their medals back at the government, saying they had suffered and killed for nothing. The government was slowly, almost silently bringing men back from Vietnam, but in the middle of June, there was a huge explosion after the New York Times published the papers taken from the Pentagon that showed that the government had been giving covert assistance to Vietnam since 1954. The papers showed how useless American efforts—the sacrifice of the limbs and lives of the men like the ones who had thrown back their medals—had been. All these things made us sick. We were sick about being Americans, responsible for these horrors.

  The Pentagon Papers appeared the month I graduated from high school. Graduation was no big deal, especially in these circumstances. I mean, we may have been the peasant walking behind the plow, but the figure in the sky behind us wasn’t tiny and was making a lot of noise. Graduation probably wouldn’t have meant much to me even if all that other stuff hadn’t been going on. Finishing high school was a major event once upon a time, but at that point it was just one more occasion for a party.

  One Sunday in June, Mom and Philo were sitting in the living room reading the New York Times and arguing, or rather discussing, the war passionately, as usual. It was around noon but I was still in my pajamas, sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee, when the doorbell rang and Philo jumped up—he was the only one dressed—and let Annette and Ted Fields into the house. I went inside. Nobody was saying anything. The Fields had Lisa with them. Annette, her hand resting on Ted’s arm, said in a trembling voice, “Andy, we’ve just left Marguerite and Derek at a school in Maine. A live-in school near the New Hampshire border. They’ll stay there now. Forever.”

  Then she burst into tears.

  We all jumped up. Mom and Philo and I all hugged her, hugged Ted, hugged Lisa. We kept patting them and making them sit down and Philo ran to get them drinks. Mom asked Lisa if she would like to play Ping-Pong or something. She nodded, so I ran upstairs and dressed quickly, then took her out to the garage, both of us carrying sodas. I don’t know what the grown-ups did after that, except I knew there was crying. It made me think about the time I went to church with Bishop one day and saw a sign that read camera lacrimosa.I asked Bishop what that was and he said it was a crying room. I asked him, “What for?” and he looked at me as if I was an idiot. As if life was about crying and I should have known that at the age of seventeen. But I couldn’t imagine reserving a room to cry in.

  I felt really bad for Annette and Ted. They had been unlucky. Many people would find Marguerite and Derek strange and difficult but to their parents they were beloved. Annette and Ted just couldn’t manage them anymore. They had to take them to a place where they could be cared for. They would not see them much anymore, or maybe not at all, because the people at the school said it was better for the children if they just forgot their parents. It was breaking their hearts. I didn’t want to think about it.

  Mom asked them to stay for dinner. Of course, they didn’t know it was supposed to be my graduation day celebration dinner—graduation had been the day before—and they accepted. They were desperate for comfort. Mom came out to the garage and asked me if I minded if she scrapped the original dinner she’d planned, which was rib lamb chops, my very favorite, and made “a more healing dinner.” I said sure, and she asked if I’d go to Savenor’s and get a couple of chickens. She was going to make the meal she always made when one of us was sick, chicken in broth with leeks and angel hair pasta. Lisa wanted to go along, so we both got in the car. I could drive now; I had my license. That was a major step. I felt so grown-up the first time I took the car out by myself. Mom begged me to drive especially carefully. I could see in her face that she was telling me, This is the one precious child to them.

  By now, Lisa, having beat me in two out of three games of Ping-Pong, had cheered up and was laughing. And only once, when I turned away from her to choose the leeks, did I notice her staring blankly into space. I pointed out old Momma Savenor, who’d been sitting at that same cash register for fifty years, and I said what a sweet old thing she was—although I didn’t even know if that was true. She was old, and that seemed to be enough to qualify for sweetness. Anyway, it cheered Lisa up to think that that old woman and her children and grandchildren were still in the same place, making a good living and being comfortable for all those years, and she was okay again.

  Philo kept trying to amuse them and the Fields tried to be cheerful all through dinner. Annette and Ted kept exclaiming how delicious it was, as if they never had dinners that good. We had this wonderful healing meal with a chocolate layer cake I’d bought, knowing that chocolate made people feel better. After they left, I was upset. I asked Mom if they’d ever recover. She said they’d get over it eventually but never completely, and I shivered with fear of becoming one of the unlucky ones.

  But they did get better. Within a year Annette and Ted were able to laugh and get upset over little things without bursting into tears, and a few years later you wouldn’t have known by looking at them that they had had such sorrow in their lives. After the children left, they threw themselves into the antiwar movement and kept it up until the war ended. Annette had majored in art history in college, but once Lisa was in college, Annette signed up for courses to learn how to teach disabled children, and after that, she got a job teaching kids who were like hers but a little more able to learn. It made her feel better, doing that. When Lisa graduated summa cum laude from Yale, she wanted to work at the State Department: she wanted to be a diplomat. But her parents’ antiwar history was held against her and she ended up teaching political science in Madison, Wisconsin. She was extremely upset at first, but got over it in time. It wasn’t a terrible fate, I thought: life can have a happy ending, even if you’re unlucky.

  I thought about things like that a lot because so many of Mom’s friends had bad luck. Her friend Kathy was beaten to death by her husband, and Alyssa’s son Tim died of cancer. After he died, Alyssa got a job and went to work every day selling dresses at Bergdorf’s. After work she went home, got into bed, ate snacks she’d bought on the way home, and watched TV until she drifted to sleep. She had no other life. Mom said she was a walking dead person, killed by grief.

  Eve Goodman took good c
are of her husband, Dan, who, with his ALS, became increasingly helpless, but lived for almost a decade. A long time, Mom said, for someone with that illness. Eve hired a young woman to help her and concealed the disgust she occasionally felt at what was required of her. At the end, Dan didn’t succumb passively. He took his own life. He had told Eve, when he could still talk, to help him when the time came, but when it did, he didn’t want to do it. We hold on to life even when it’s unendurable. But finally he drank a potion of drugs, and then Eve went to pieces.

  So many people had something terrible happen to them that it began to seem to me that everybody did. It made me so nervous. I was terrified about what was going to happen to me. Even the sweet Gross family next door, who were graced with good luck and happiness with their three sons, fell to pieces when their oldest son was killed in Vietnam. His mother, Lenny, never got over it. Whenever she mentioned his name, or anybody referred to the war, her eyes teared up.

  I don’t believe the people who insist that if you obey God’s rules (how can anyone know what God’s rules are?) you will be safe. What can make you safe in the world? People have searched for something magical to make them safe, but they’ve never found it. It’s understandable that people would want to believe that there is someone or something who can protect them from the terrible things that happen. But there isn’t, and I don’t even think about that. What I think about is how people get over the terrible things that do happen to them. How come terrible things don’t just end your life? Could you let yourself trust again, relax again, in somebody’s arms? Could you really believe that the future will be happy? Did the people who endured the Holocaust ever get over it? Did their children? Could Annette and Ted ever forget, no matter how old they got, Derek and Marguerite, and the days of their birth and the discovery of their impediments, and the day upon day of anxious tedium and dull, endless love they spent taking care of them?

  Does life really go on? How?

  I hadn’t seen Steve since the day we went to his apartment. We hadn’t talked and I hadn’t been able to talk to anyone else about it—Sandy was at camp and Bishop at his uncle’s dude ranch. But as the weeks went on and college came nearer, Steve receded from my mind. It was as if some door had shut. And it came to me in a slow wave that the person I really loved was Philo. I mulled this over and finally decided I had to act.

  I waited until a night Philo was at his mother’s house. Mom and I had shrimp and peas and rice for dinner that night. It was nice being alone; much as I loved Philo, it was also good when he wasn’t there. We sat smoking together as darkness gathered outside. “Mom,” I began.

  “Yes, sweetie.”

  “I’m in love with Philo.”

  “I know you love Philo.”

  “No. I’m in love with him.”

  She turned toward me. I could see the outline of her head, but not her face. She couldn’t see mine either.

  “I think you should give him to me.”

  She was silent for a while. Finally she said, “He’s not a piece of meat to be handed over.”

  “No. But if you told him it was okay, he’d want me. He wants me.”

  She stared at me. It was a long time before she said anything. “He well may.”

  “But he won’t act on it unless you say it’s okay.”

  “No.”

  “So I think you should.”

  Again, a long silence. By now, my pulse was beating so hard it seemed my heartbeat drummed the beat for the insect chorus outside. But I contained myself. I didn’t say another word.

  After a long time, she tamped out her cigarette and stood up. “I’ll think about this, Jess.” She piled dishes on a tray and went into the kitchen. I didn’t help. I left the rest of the dishes on the table and just sat there. I lit another cigarette.

  As time passed, I watched Mom suspiciously. I wasn’t about to let her just drop the whole subject. After I left for college, there was no point in her giving me Philo. I wanted him now; I wanted him to bond with me so he would drive up to Andrews to see me on weekends, the way he drove to Cambridge on weekends to see Mom. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but she waited weeks before she said anything. After dinner one night she said, “Jess, we need to talk.”

  I was all attention.

  We both lit cigarettes. You did that in those days, as if smoking was a preamble to personal drama. They did it in the movies, like a curtain going up, an overture.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she began. “At first I thought maybe I should do what you want, at least give Philo the choice. You’re seventeen now and old enough to have a relationship. Maybe I should step out of your way and let Philo decide what he wants to do.”

  By now, I was grinning.

  “But then I thought more about it. And I’ve decided it’s a bad idea. I know Philo loves you; I can see that. And that you love him. But he’s been my lover, and you’re my daughter. And no matter how the three of us try to avoid it, we will draw comparisons. You’ll always be asking him or at least wondering if you are better than I was. He’ll always compare the two of us; he can’t help doing that. And no matter how hard I try not to, if he chooses you, I will feel resentful. And if he chooses me, you will. It would be bad for our relationship, yours and mine. It would be bad for Philo and his relationship with both of us. It’s a bad idea, Jess, and I’m not going to do it.”

  I just sat there and said, “Okay.” Okay! As if it was okay! I didn’t get angry, I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything! I said, “Okay,” and then, Goody Two-Shoes, I helped Mom do the dishes. I didn’t think. That’s, of course, my solution to everything—don’t think about it. But actually, while I’m not thinking, part of my mind is working away like mad, planning, planning. When I was in college, I read that Catherine de Medici was a clever woman who would say, “Hate and wait.” I didn’t hate my mom. But I also knew that I was the one with the time to wait, and I could. I’d wait.

  I ran the household that summer to the point where I worried about how Mom and Philo would manage when I went away to school. Mom had finished most of her research and was writing her book. Now that Dad had stopped coming around, she often worked at home. Her study tables were covered with papers and card files and journals taken from the library. She used an IBM Selectric typewriter I envied deeply. I had to type my school papers on the old manual Royal portable I’d inherited from her. I kept hinting for a typewriter as a graduation present, but I knew they were expensive. Philo was still doing research, taking notes in longhand on five-by-seven cards he filed in a gray metal box.

  Either Mom and I did the marketing together or I did it alone. Both Mom and I shopped with Philo in mind because he was at our house almost all the time that summer. He had become a member of the family, and that made me extremely happy. I waited tables for money for clothes and books and to save for all the expenses I’d have at college next year. Dad hadn’t sent any child support since he’d remarried. We hadn’t known he had remarried—we just knew he wasn’t sending money—until we had a phone call from Irene Templer. Mom had met Irene and Dan Templer years ago when we spent summers in Vermont. They lived up there year round, in a big old house on a hill. Dan was a doctor. Mom thought he was wonderful because he still made house calls. Irene was an artist. She painted in watercolors, Vermonty pictures of old houses and barns and gardens, selling them to tourists, and did very well.

  Mom liked Irene, but they only saw each other when Mom was in Vermont, so she was surprised when Irene called us in Cambridge one night. Irene sounded upset. She said she knew a young woman named Julie, a waitress at the bistro. Irene and Julie had become friendly, and last week, while Irene was waiting for her club sandwich and Coke, Julie told her she was getting married.

  “That’s wonderful!” Irene said. “Who are you marrying?” And Julie said Pat Leighton.

  Irene was shocked. “You can’t marry Pat Leighton!” she scolded. “He’s already married, and his wife is a friend of mine!”
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br />   “Oh, they’re divorced,” Julie said vaguely.

  Was that possible? Irene had wanted to know. Was it true? How horrible!

  I guess Dad must have been lonely. That was really fast. And Julie was only twenty and hardly his intellectual or emotional equal—or at least so Irene said. Irene said Julie was nice enough and had finished high school but that then she went to work as a waitress. She worked in the same café I’d worked at, which felt a little strange. Dad never called to tell me he was getting married or to invite me to his wedding. But maybe he didn’t really have a wedding.

  Mom made a face and said, “Poor girl, having to live in a house without a toilet.” Irene said he was putting one in for Julie. When she heard that, Mom was hopping mad. She didn’t give a damn that he was getting married, she said; she was mad that he’d put in a toilet for someone he’d just met when all those years he’d protested that he loved her above anything on earth, but he wouldn’t put in a toilet for her.

  Maybe out of guilt, Dad sent a check for my support in July, and Mom wrote him a thank you note. In it she asked if by marrying again he was sure he wasn’t committing bigamy. But she said the real reason she wrote was to let him know I’d be at Andrews next September. I guessed she said it in a way that he would think that I was going there to be nearer to him—a complete fabrication. “So it isn’t just governments that lie,” I said to her. And she answered—just like a government—that it was a strategic move. In truth, northern Vermont, where my college was, was farther from him than Cambridge. But Mom wanted him to pay more attention to me, to spend time with me. She seemed to think I wanted that. Or needed it. Every time he called to beg her to come back, she’d urge him to call me or come and see me—that is, if she could, before he began cursing her. I’d hear her talking in her room as I came up the stairs to start my homework, or even from my room. I always knew it was him. Her voice became strained in a way it didn’t with anybody else. And it usually ended with her slamming down the phone.