The Love Children Read online

  “Harry!” he boomed back.

  They chatted like old friends. I just stood there until Dad turned to me. “And this is my daughter, Jessamin.”

  Harry turned on me what he probably thought of as his charm. It felt like a blast of heat. He turned away and we followed him out the side door, and he said something to a boy in a grease-stained uniform, who ran off. He and Dad went on blustering to each other, while I stood there trying to figure out if my father had gone completely over the edge, or what was happening. Pretty soon, a little red Fiat convertible pulled up in front of us.

  “There she is,” Harry boomed cheerfully.

  “Cute as a bug,” my father grinned. He looked at me. “Get in, Jess. It’s yours.”

  That day glows in my mind still. They say money can’t buy happiness, and it’s true that after a few years the car didn’t affect my spirits at all, but that day and for a long time afterward, I floated in joy. Daddy said he’d bought it because it was a pain in the neck to drive all the way up to Andrews to get me and then drive me back again whenever I visited him. But I’d only visited him once the whole year and I wondered why he had to spoil his generosity by being mean. He told Harry what I’d heard him say to other men, that I was a drag on him, costing him money and time, especially my college education; maybe that’s how he felt, but then why was there always a tinge of pride in his voice when he said it? And why was he always laughing while he said it? And they would nod their heads and laugh too. Were his jokes a cover-up for affection for me that he was, for some reason, ashamed of? Was it not manly to love your daughter? My father’s sense of things often seemed to me to reflect an upside-down world.

  He ordered me to follow him on the highway, but sometimes he’d get behind me as we drove together the rest of the way to Cambridge. We arrived late in the afternoon; Mom was there but not Philo—I’d called to warn her that Daddy was bringing me home. He took her out to see the car, and as he preened, she seized up with worry. “It’s so tiny!” I heard her whisper to him. “If she has an accident, Pat, she’s dead.”

  “She won’t,” he said.

  She didn’t ask him to stay to dinner, which I thought was mean, since he’d been so kind all day, and he was surely tired, especially after those Manhattans, and now he would have to drive all the way back to Marlboro. I was appalled at her unkindness, until I realized that if he stayed, he’d have got drunk and maybe become abusive; he’d have wanted to stay the night and she’d have had to let him, drunk as he was. So maybe she was right. Still, it seemed sad that my mother could not even manage to be a decent human being for my father. Or he for her, I guess. I clung to him before he left: he’d been so nice to me, he’d never been so nice, and I had a terrible premonition that I’d never see him again. I begged him to call me when he got home and he promised he would, but I waited up late and he didn’t. I didn’t dare call Julie too late at night, so I called the next day and she said he’d come in at two in the morning, sloshed but in a good mood. So that was okay.

  I got good grades my first year, all A’s, even in political science. My mother was pleased, and I guess I was too, but down deep, I didn’t care. What would good grades do for me? I wasn’t planning to go to graduate school. I was in college to learn about life; that was what mattered. I thought about Aristotle and his pupils, wandering around Athens talking and arguing without ever even having heard of grades or degrees or a curriculum, just learning to think.

  That summer in Cambridge the air was full of schadenfreude. Men associated with Richard Nixon had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, and Nixon was in trouble. I went to see Sonny, who hired me for the summer. I was happy to get the job, because even with my new car I figured I was going to be pretty lonely that summer. Sandy was supposed to be a camp counselor again and Bishop, Dolores, and Steve had disappeared. The only things I could think of to occupy me besides work was going to the movies or a concert with Mom and talking to Philo on the weekends. I loved to see Philo, but I was sad that Mom had put him out of my reach.

  But Sandy called as soon as she got home from school, bursting with news. We planned lunch, although not at Bailey’s, Sandy having become a vegetarian. We went to Aragon, a little Spanish restaurant that offered a vegetable plate—a rarity in those days. Aragon had white tablecloths and guitar music played low on the stereo, and we each had the vegetable plate and a small glass of red wine and felt terribly sophisticated.

  In a portentous tone, Sandy announced that she was gay. She was madly in love with a woman named Sarah, who lived in her dorm. Sarah came from Marblehead, from a WASP family who were very rich and very proper but eccentric and just a little alcoholic (martinis every day at six, wine with dinner, cognac afterward) and traced their ancestors to the Mayflower. They did not care for Jews. Sarah didn’t agree with them. Sarah was brave.

  Hearing this, I confessed that I might be gay too, because I was involved with a girl named Melanie, who lived in my dorm and came from New Jersey, from a small lakeside town called Greenpond. Melanie was often melancholy; at other times she got so giggly that I couldn’t stop laughing. For some reason, Melanie looked up to me. She seemed to think I was decisive. Actually, I wasn’t sure I was in love with her, but it felt modern and daring to be with her just then. So when Melanie had problems with her roommate, I invited her to share my room. She leaped to be with me and I felt a tremendous gush of something I thought was love. And the thing was, we gave each other orgasms every time.

  Sandy and I showed each other pictures of our new friends and laughed at the fact that our discoveries had occurred at the same time. Then we started to talk about Bishop. I told her how dumb I felt about the Connollys. I said I felt naive and thought my values were shallow.

  Sandy said, “I felt the same way. I don’t think that was stupid. They were a great family. Why shouldn’t you think that they were happy? They were happy!”

  “Yes, but look at them now.”

  “That doesn’t mean they weren’t happy then. Just because a bad thing happened, something that made them unhappy, that doesn’t erase the happiness they had.”

  “Except that the whole time Mr. Connolly was taking bribe money.”

  “Umm.” She lit a cigarette. “You mean, Mr. Connolly wouldn’t have been happy because he was doing a bad thing and knew it? But maybe he was. Maybe he didn’t feel bad about what he was doing. And the rest of them didn’t know it, so they were happy as clams.”

  “He couldn’t have been happy doing an illegal thing,” I argued.

  She pondered. “Why not?”

  “You just can’t. You have to be scared you’ll be caught. Even if you don’t let yourself think about it, your body is scared all the time. How can you call them a happy family if he wasn’t happy too?”

  She studied me. “You mean,” she said slowly, “in a happy family, everybody has to be happy?”

  “Of course. Otherwise it isn’t a happy family. It’s a happy person. But not a happy family. Could you say my family was happy and only count me? Or Mom and me? You could say we were happy when Dad wasn’t around. But that makes the phrase meaningless, happy family.”

  She thought for a while, then laughed. “Well, you have a gift for happiness.”

  “Do I? Really? Oh, I wish I could share it with Bishop.”

  “I heard he dropped out of Yale.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Well, they probably couldn’t afford to keep him there.”

  “Oh?” I hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah.”

  “I wish he’d call. Or write. Let us know where he is.”

  “Yeah.”

  We both fell into gloom then.

  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” Sandy intoned.

  One reason I always loved Sandy was that she knew poetry.

  “But do things always fall apart?”

  “No. Not everything,” she assured me. “We aren’t falling apart.”

  “Let’s not,” I urged.
“You and me.”

  She put her hand across the table and took mine. “We won’t.”

  “We made the same pact with Bishop,” I said.

  “I know.”

  A week later, Sandy’s plans completely changed. She had just heard that Sarah had got a job in Boston for the summer, as an intern at Houghton Mifflin. Could Sandy leave if Sarah was coming to Boston? Yet Sandy knew her parents would disapprove of her abandoning her summer job. They were very principled. “They’ll say I have an obligation to make good on my promise. And I do feel bad letting down the people who run the camp. But Sarah is more important, don’t you think? Love is more important than duty, isn’t it?”

  “Love is more important,” I said with certainty.

  Of course love won. This made me happy; I began to hope I might have fun that summer after all, with Sandy and Sarah. The women’s movement was burgeoning. Women all over town were starting new enterprises—a restaurant called Bread and Roses, with a vegetarian menu, good soups and breads and salads, and extremely low prices; a couple of terrific women’s newspapers; and a medical clinic for poor women. The clinic was set up by female students in the med schools at Harvard and UMass and other local colleges and was located in the Portuguese part of Cambridge. It was funded by a grant and the women who worked there took very little pay. They treated any woman who walked in for a minimal fee, or for free if she were really poor. Sandy’s sister Rhoda had gone to undergraduate school with one of the women who was working there now as a doctor, and she told Sandy about it. So Sandy applied for a job as a receptionist and was hired. In the end, she became much more than a receptionist—she was a coordinator, a nurse, a secretary, a babysitter: she did everything. She was paid the same as the doctors—everyone got seventy-five dollars a week. That was how the women wanted to do things: everyone was paid the same pittance. But she was doing it for love, so she didn’t care. Besides, when her father found out what she was doing, he was so proud of her that he increased her allowance.

  Then Sandy had news about the Connollys. Her mother had a cousin who lived near Dorchester and sometimes shopped at the Star Market there. This cousin, Lily, recognized Mrs. Connolly because there had been joint charity projects between her chapter of B’nai Brith and the women who helped Catholic Charities in Mrs. Connolly’s parish. Mrs. Connolly had been a leader in that group; she had spoken at some of their meetings, so Lily knew who she was. And of course she had followed their story in the papers. So when she saw Mrs. Connolly in the Star Market one day, she mentioned it to Mrs. Lipkin, who told her that Sandy would dearly like to know where they were living. The next time Lily saw Mrs. Connolly, she followed her out of the store and watched which way she walked.

  So did I want to go with Sandy to try to find them?

  I would drive us, I said. Then came the question, Should we take things?

  We pondered. We wanted to take as much as we could—food, clothes, wine—but we didn’t want to humiliate Mrs. Connolly. We decided to take only a few toys for the boys and a box of candy and a basket of fruit for Mrs. Connolly—sparse recompense for all the hospitality they had offered us over the years. We bought a street map of South Boston and set a date and time. It was a beautiful June morning, a Saturday, when Mrs. Connolly would not be working at the school. We drove to South Boston, to a neighborhood of shabby three-deckers with cracked side-walks, dilapidated stores, and a few scrawny trees. We found the Star Market and drove a few blocks in the direction that Sandy’s mother’s cousin had seen Mrs. Connolly walk. Then we got out of the car and wandered around. We rang some doorbells and asked for the Connollys. We told people we had been to school with Bishop and were trying to find him. Most people were sympathetic. The folks in that neighborhood were often on the outs with the cops and saw the Connollys as just another persecuted Irish family. We knew people would know them: they were famous. And eventually we were pointed to the right house—an old three-decker with stained brown siding and a front yard full of weeds and broken bike pieces. We climbed the front stairs and found their name on the bell. We rang it.

  We were sick with nervousness.

  Lloyd Connolly answered the door. We had last seen him at a Christmas party when he was seven; he not only was taller now, but also had a hard expression on his face.

  “Hi,” he said, puzzled, surprised.

  “Hi, Lloyd. You remember us? Sandy and Jessamin. We were friends of Bishop’s and we used to be at your house a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We came to visit your mother.”

  “Uh. Oh. Well, okay,” he said, letting us in. He ran up the stairs and we followed him up two flights to the third floor. Near the top, he began to yell. “Mom! Company!”

  She came to the apartment door, looking bewildered. We stood, paralyzed. She was old, white-haired and wrinkled. She was wearing a shapeless cotton dress and smoking a filter-tip cigarette.

  “Mrs. Connolly!” Sandy gushed. “It’s Sandy and Jess, remember us?”

  “Girls,” she faltered. “Bishop isn’t . . .”

  “No, we came to see you,” I said in a false cheery voice.

  “Oh, well, come in, come in, girls, do.”

  We held our gifts out in front of us like armor. Sandy handed the toys to Lloyd, who was still standing behind his mother.

  “These are for you and your brothers,” she said, and he cried, “Okay!” and went charging off, yelling for Philip. “And these are for you,” I said, handing Mrs. Connolly the fruit and candy. We followed her into the front room.

  The dingy white walls of the apartment were cracked crazily. Elegant furniture from the old house, shabbier than I remembered, crowded the room. The tables were dusty and the doilies a little gray, and a huge television set from the old house dominated the small space.

  “Can I offer you some tea, girls?” Mrs. Connolly asked.

  “Oh, no thanks!” we chimed.

  “Oh, you have to have tea! Lloyd!” she called out, “Put the kettle on!”

  “How are you?” I asked her, searching her face. “All of you?”

  She shrugged. “Sure, we’re fine. We lost Patrick, you know. Last year. Of course you hardly knew him, but . . .” She pulled a hanky out of her dress top and wiped her eyes. “And Gus was wounded. In the leg. This terrible war! But he’s fine, he’s a major now and they’re promising to send him home soon. He’s going to stay in; he might as well, he has so much time in now. He’ll be stationed in California. He’s a good boy, he helps us out. John—Mr. Connolly—he’ll be home in a few months, we think. Things should pick up then. And Maggie and Francis and their little ones are glorious, thanks be to God. Francis works for the bursar at Boston College, you know,” she offered, sounding deeply impressed. “Maggie’s over here regular, our godsend. Michael graduated from Holy Cross this June, thanks be to God, and he’s living out in Framingham; he has a job in an insurance company there. Billy’s in his last year of high school and Eugene’s a sophomore. They have jobs at the Star Market, so they’re not home now. So there’s only Lloyd left, who’s nine, and Philip, who’s seven now. And that’s all of them. We’re managing fine.”

  Throughout this conversation, Mrs. Connolly had been twisting her hands together almost constantly, so while her face bore a small smile, her hands countered the message.

  “And how is Bishop?”

  Her hands stopped dead. She looked at the wall. “Sure, he’s fine,” she said.

  “Where is he? We’ve been calling and writing . . .” Sandy began.

  “Ach, I know you’ve been faithful friends. I gave him your letters, girls, last time I saw him. But he’s taken all this very hard. You know, he was a bit on the outs with his dad, back when the war . . . even before all our troubles . . . and then, when . . . he felt his dad had let us down, betrayed the family, Oh, he’s a sensitive boy, you know . . .”

  “So where is he living?” Sandy pursued relentlessly.

  “He’s livin’ in a sort of commune place, you kno
w? Up in western Massachusetts somewhere. In the far mountains. I’ve never seen it, it’s out of the way, we have to send his mail to a post office box. They have horses, and he’s good with horses. Bunch of hippies,” she lamented, “on a farm.”

  Sandy and I looked at each other.

  “Oh, that’s good,” Sandy said. “He’s safe, then.”

  “He’s neglecting his education. Bishop was the smartest of the boys. He had a scholarship, and they would have given him another one, surely.”

  “Probably he’ll go back,” Sandy reassured her. “Someday.”

  “You think so? John had such hopes for him . . .”

  “Oh, I think so. He’s too smart not to,” Sandy insisted.

  She seemed to relax for the first time since we arrived. “Well, you were his best friends, girls. If you think so . . .” Her forehead smoothed a little.

  Lloyd appeared, carrying a heavy tray bearing a teapot, cups, saucers, and a plate of vanilla wafers. He set the tray down on the coffee table in front of his mother. Her silver spoons had given way to cheap stainless, but she still had the lace-edged tea napkins. The teapot was her beautiful old Minton china. The top was a little chipped, so she couldn’t have sold it. The cups and saucers were glass. She poured tea for us as formally as the girls’ dean of students at Smith, the one time I visited Sandy, adding cream and sugar after asking. Sandy and I each took a single cookie, nibbling politely.

  “So! How are you girls doin’?” she asked, her chore complete.

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Sandy’s studying pre-med at Smith, and I’m at Andrews. We’re fine, but we miss Bishop and we’ve been worried about him.”

  “Sure and I’ll tell him next time I write. They aren’t on the phone up there, and I’m not the best writer, you know. Billy writes sometimes though.”

  “We hope your family will all be together again soon,” Sandy said.

  I thought, not for the first time, how tactful and gracious she was. I would never have thought to put it that way. My thought was, “I hope the old man gets out of the joint real soon, I hope he’ll be able to call in markers from some of his old graft buddies to give him a decent job and get you out of this shithouse,” but it wasn’t something I would say aloud.