The Love Children Page 15

  I distracted myself from all that by signing up for a course at Winship College, a small school a few miles away, where we could take courses not offered at Andrews. They had one called The Bible as Literature, which fascinated me, since I’d never read the Bible and had often wondered about it. It was taught by Dr. Munford, a Protestant minister, who, I thought, should be an expert.

  I was enthralled with the Bible from the first day. We used the King James version. I loved the way it was written, so spare and resounding; the stories were so vivid that I could picture living long ago in a hot, dry, hilly place, among animal herders. I wondered what the people were like who wrote the stories, J and P and E. I would get excited in class and was constantly waving my arm in the air to ask questions, but Dr. Munford seemed reluctant to call on me. I thought maybe he was shy. I found amazing the tales of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Esau—and the women, who were barely mentioned, but still so vivid. Sarah laughed, it said. I loved that. And I loved that Jacob thought he could affect generation by putting twigs in the animals’ drinking water.

  That fall, posters appeared announcing a new organization, Queer Andrews, for gay men and lesbians. Their first meeting, on a Sunday morning (during chapel!) was to be held at the Hub, a local coffee house. Missing the Poetry Club, I decided to go to this meeting, to show solidarity with gay people like Sandy, and because I had been gay myself for a while and still thought I might be gay.

  When I arrived at the Hub, half a dozen women and two or three guys were milling about. I didn’t think there were only two gay men on campus: maybe boys were not too keen on being identified as gay. Everyone stared at me as though I was a foreigner, so I was a little uncomfortable. By eleven, when the meeting started, four more women had come in but no more men. A tall, slender, handsome woman with long hair and a light sprinkling of freckles across her nose stood at the front of the room and announced that the meeting was open. She gave a little speech, offering her name, Liz Reilly, and explaining why she and her friends felt that an organization was needed. Prejudice against homosexuals, she said, which was endemic in the nation and certainly in the state and even in the college, made it necessary. In the past, girls were expelled from college for any behavior that intimated same-sex affection, and everyone knew what had happened to Oscar Wilde. The group would dedicate itself to addressing issues of concern to gays and making its positions known to the college authorities. She asked for comments.

  A short, stocky woman raised her hand. She stood and looked around the room. “My name is Frances Maniscalco,” she said. “I think it’s important that we know each other and that we all share the same values. We don’t want reporters or administration spies poking their way in, so I think we should all identify ourselves.”

  “Okay,” Liz agreed. “Let’s go around the room, people.”

  Frances moved to the front of the room to stand with Liz.

  People gave their names and their year. When it came to me, I did the same. Frances faced me. “Who did you say you were?”

  I blinked and repeated. “I’m Jessamin Leighton, a sophomore. I live in Lester Hall.”

  “Why are you here?” Liz moved closer to Frances.

  I know I turned red. No one else had been asked that question. “I . . . uh . . . wanted to show solidarity . . . I have gay friends . . . and I . . .” I was trying to think of how to explain that I’d been involved with Melanie without using her name (she’d be mortified), but I faltered.

  “Solidarity? Are you gay?” Liz asked sarcastically.

  “Maybe . . . I’m not sure.”

  “You don’t know? You come here and you don’t know? Aren’t you a writer? Are you planning to write an exposé?”

  “No!” I protested. “Well, yes, I’m a poet, but I don’t write for the newspaper; I write poetry. Anyway, I thought you said anyone interested could come . . .”

  “You’re interested?” A third woman joined them—it now felt like a gang. “You?” she cried. “The school pump? Who will fuck any man at all, of any size, shape, or color, according to Chris Hurley! Who has worked her way through the male population of Andrews!”

  They were staring at me with such hostility that I started to feel frightened. I realized that they all knew each other and thought they knew me. It was a closed circle I had intruded upon. I pulled on my jacket and said, “Sorry!” and fled from the room.

  I ran to my room, locked my door, and threw myself on the bed, shivering. I lay there, not crying, not thinking, just trying to catch my breath, trying to understand why they hated me so much. What did I represent to them? What did they see when they looked at me? Had Chris really said that about me? How many guys did they think I’d fucked? School pump! What a phrase! Well, I had slept with five or six guys last year. But how did they all know that? Was Chris angry because Steve was black?

  The hurt of it didn’t go away. For weeks afterward, I walked around the campus almost cowering, as though I was expecting to be hit, snarled at, called names. I’d be walking along and catch myself that way. School pump! I vowed not to sleep with another boy my entire time at Andrews. I thought of transferring out. I wanted to go home.

  I threw myself into my courses, reading late into the night, working hard on my papers. I could actually forget the whole thing when I got into my papers. I was writing one on Sarah, on how she must have felt about Abraham taking Isaac off to sacrifice him, this child of her extreme old age, and her husband about to cut his throat; what did she think about that? Did he even tell her? What did she think about Abraham’s god, who had made her laugh but who had given an order like that? And why were her feelings not in the story—weren’t they important? Didn’t she matter? I mean, she was his mother. I wrote with passion, envisioning her standing alone, watching them walk away from her, her husband and her precious boy, watching their backs as they headed out into the desert, walking for days toward a certain rock, the sun beating down malignantly . . .

  I handed in my paper just before Thanksgiving, then packed a bag and drove to Dad’s for the four-day break. I felt that since he had bought me the car, I had to visit him a few times, at least. Julie had some friends coming for Thanksgiving dinner, and she was thrilled to have me come too. I don’t know why, but she liked me—so of course I liked her back.

  She was proud of my old room, now the guest room, which she’d decorated with little baskets with pink bows and straw flowers and a flouncy pink bedspread. She took me upstairs, practically begging for my approval. And I discovered that I do not do well in positions of power. I was just like my father. Julie constantly tried to placate Daddy, to keep him from getting angry, and the harder she tried, the worse Dad got. And she tried to please me too, and damn if I didn’t get more and more negative and sullen. I just couldn’t help it. The weekend gave me a new perspective on Uncle Vanya, which we had read in modern drama, and I vowed never to put myself in Julie’s—Vanya’s—position. When you need love desperately and show your neediness, you can count on people kicking you. The weekend gave me a new perspective on myself. I gave Julie a really hard time—about my room, about the meals she planned to serve, and about her cooking. I almost made her cry a couple of times. Daddy even looked over, a little surprised. Not that he would disapprove. Maybe the women at the meeting were right; maybe I was fundamentally rotten.

  Driving back to school, my stomach kept twisting and I thought again of transferring out of Andrews. It didn’t seem a welcoming place anymore. I told myself I was making a mountain out of a molehill, that what had happened was nothing. So a dozen people didn’t like me, so what? They didn’t even know me, they just thought they did. But I couldn’t calm down.

  There were only three weeks left in the semester. The term ended at Christmas break, after which I’d have almost a month off to decide what to do.

  I had been back a week and was beginning to feel a little calmer, when Dr. Munford handed back our papers. I gaped at mine: I had an F. I had never received less than a B on any sc
hool-work. I examined it carefully. There were no markings on it, no comments. There wasn’t even a spelling error. Just the F. My mind went blank, and after lying on my bed and rereading the paper several times, I picked up the phone. I hadn’t been calling Mom very often; I was still upset with her about Chris. But I had to call her now; I didn’t know what else to do. I told her what had happened. She was very sympathetic. She knew I wasn’t an F student. What killed me was getting an F in a subject I was so interested in. How could that have happened? I’d never failed so abysmally! I asked her if I could read her my paper.

  “Well?” I asked when I was through.

  “I can hear your excitement about the subject,” she said. “And I like that you were thinking for yourself. Just that alone is rare in a student paper. I would never give an F to an undergraduate who did independent thinking. And there are no grammatical errors and, I take it, no spelling errors. So there’s no reason for an F.”

  “Yes, but?” I hung on her words, I could barely breathe.

  “But you don’t know much about the Bible, and you’re a little incoherent sometimes—or maybe enthusiastic is a better word. If I got that paper, I’d probably give it a B or a B+. I certainly would never give it less than a C.”

  “Even when you were teaching at Harvard?”

  “Even then.”

  I could breathe again. “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Maybe this man is rigidly religious or something . . .”

  “Do I sound not religious?”

  “Well, you’re questioning the Bible a bit,” she said. I could hear a smile. “Maybe he can’t tolerate that.”

  Something in my heart eased. “Oh. Thanks, Mom. You’re sure?”

  “Sure. Positive. It’s an interesting paper, honey. I like it.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” I would never get angry at my mother again. Never.

  The next day, as soon as my modern drama class ended, I boarded the shuttle bus for Winship. It took twenty minutes, and I had to stand in the hall for forty minutes until Munford arrived for his office hours. When he saw me there, he looked annoyed. But I steeled myself. I went in and sat down without being asked.

  “Dr. Munford, can you tell me why you gave me an F on my paper? I’ve never received an F before, and I didn’t think this was a failing paper. I was probably too excited about the material . . .”

  “Really,” he drawled sarcastically.

  “Yes!” I insisted. “I find the Bible fascinating. That’s why I was shocked by the grade. So I read the paper to my mother, who teaches at Harvard.” Well, she used to. “And she said she wouldn’t give it less than a C. So I wondered . . .”

  He stood up so fast he knocked some papers off his desk. “You aggressive bitch!” he almost shouted. “Get out of my office!”

  I stared at him, leaped up, and ran out. My heart was banging in my chest and I couldn’t catch my breath. I sat panting on the bus, waiting for it to leave. What was the matter with me? What was I doing? Was I some monstrous person and just didn’t know it? What did people see when they looked at me? Was I so stupid I didn’t know how I was perceived? Was I unknowingly doing something obnoxious? Was I really so hideous in the eyes of people like Dr. Munford and Frances Maniscalco and Liz Reilly, from the meeting? If I was misunderstanding things, was there anything I could do about it? Was I responsible for it? Was there any way I could change how they saw me? And if not, how could I go on living in this world?

  By the time I got back to Andrews, it was late afternoon and already getting dark. I went into my room, which was really messy, and beat myself up for being such a slob. I had to clean this place! I began to pick things up to put them away, but I put them, not in drawers or shelves, but in boxes and suitcases. I just kept doing it, putting everything away, out of sight, in something—everything, my clothes, books, electric typewriter, notes, radio, hair curlers. Then I carried load after load down the stairs and stacked them in my car. I didn’t pass anyone I knew on any of these trips down and back; I knew that was a sign. When I had emptied my room, I got into the car and started the long drive home.

  I got to the house very late that night. Mom was asleep and didn’t hear me come in. I didn’t unpack; I was exhausted and it was cold out, very cold for November. I dragged myself up to my room and, still dressed in my jeans and sweater and heavy jacket, crawled into bed. The next day, a Saturday, Mom was in the kitchen when I came down for coffee. She was startled to see me, and even more so when I burst into tears at the sight of her. She came over and held me; I stood there and just let her. We stood like that for a long time.

  I didn’t feel too good, and I couldn’t think what would make me feel better.

  I told Mom everything. She already knew the first part about the paper, but I told her about the gay and lesbian meeting, and I told her about Christopher. She listened to me, smoothed my hair, murmured, “My poor girl,” and, “Poor baby,” which I wanted to hear. She said she didn’t understand what had happened; she insisted I hadn’t done anything grotesque or ridiculous to other people. She said that things like that happened to everybody once in a while and that they were probably accidents. I had appeared in somebody’s world at exactly the wrong moment for them. I’d been in a state of dread, driving home, imagining that Mom would be mad at me for leaving school like that, not even finishing the semester. But she said she didn’t blame me for leaving and that I should never go back.

  “When you go back to college, maybe you should go to a school that’s a little better than Andrews. Where the students are more on your level,” she said.

  What was she saying?

  “People have a hard time accepting someone who is clearly superior to them,” she said. She was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t work. I didn’t believe people were jealous of me. There was something I was doing.

  We had coffee and cake and then sat smoking and talking. Mom seemed a little low, and finally she told me she’d broken up with Philo.

  “No! How could you?” I burst out.

  “I had to,” she said. “It was time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She pondered. “It’s hard to explain. He’s so much younger than I am . . .”

  “That never bothered you before!”

  “Yes, it did, Jess. I just didn’t talk about it. I told myself he’d mature over the years, but there’s something about this relationship—I think my presence inhibits his growth. He isn’t growing, isn’t changing. I’m holding him back . . .”

  “Don’t lie!” I stormed. I wasn’t going to let her lay the blame on him!

  She looked at me. “You can try to understand. If you won’t, I’ll stop talking.”

  I sulked.

  She got up and washed the breakfast dishes. Then she went up to her room to get dressed. I sat at the kitchen table, smoking. After a while, I bent double and wrenched out some huge sobs, crying in a way I hadn’t probably since I was an infant in my crib.

  The next weeks passed. I don’t know what I did or thought or felt. I did some reading. I watched TV. I listened to some music. One day I got in my car and drove out to Lexington and Concord, but didn’t even get out of the car when I got there. I played solitaire up in my room. I played Mom’s music on my stereo, the last scene of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, which always made me cry. As if I believed that love invariably ends with renunciation. Maybe I did.

  Sandy came home for the Christmas holidays. I didn’t tell her what had happened to me at school or with Chris. I was humiliated, too ashamed to talk about it. But it was a strain not to talk about it, to get her opinion about what was happening, to share the worst event of my life with my best friend. Not telling Sandy also put me at a distance. I didn’t like that but couldn’t seem to change it. I was also at a distance from Mom, from everybody. From myself.

  The one thing I was enthusiastic about, although Sandy took control, was visiting Mrs. Connolly over Christmas break. We wanted to t
ake something useful this time. Sandy called some of Bishop’s other friends from Barnes, who chipped in, and we bought two electric blankets, a turkey, fruit, and candy. We drove over there the Saturday before Christmas.

  This time we’d called ahead and Mrs. Connolly was waiting for us. She seemed happy to see us and didn’t seem to mind getting the turkey or the blankets, even if she was a little vague about them. She had prepared tea for us; she was bubbly: “John’s getting out for Christmas, girls! He’ll be home soon!”

  He was getting out early. Someone must have paid somebody off or twisted somebody’s arm to get him a reduced sentence. That was okay by us. We thought taking bribes was bad, but not seriously so. And we knew it was business as usual in the larger world, the part of the world we were barred from joining. We weren’t opposed to his being punished but we didn’t like seeing someone we knew and liked suffering. We’d been exultant when Spiro Agnew had had to resign in shame as Nixon’s vice president, for taking bribes, but we thought he was an idiot, whereas we knew Mr. Connolly was a nice man, generous and kind to his family.

  Thinking about Mr. Connolly took us back to our old discussions of good and evil. My friends and I tended to judge acts according to how we felt about the people who performed them, rather than on principle. One day in civics class in high school, Carl Hess, one of the smartest kids in our class, a whiz at science and math, had said that our thinking was plebian, that a Harvard professor had said that people with really good morals judged others according to principle. I argued back that what some people called “principles” often bore no relation to reality and were actually prejudices. I reminded him that Hitler persecuted Jews on the principle, accepted by many scientists of the period, that the races had particular traits and were ranked in a hierarchy, just as the Harvard professor was ranking us by morals.

  In any case, principles in politics and business were as beyond our comprehension as government policy on drugs. Sandy, Bishop, Dolores, and I used to discuss that for hours. People wanted drugs and would pay for them. People said drugs were really bad for you, but we disagreed. We were pretty sure marijuana was not harmful at all, certainly less harmful than alcohol, and could even help people who were in pain or upset. Maybe heroin was bad for you, but didn’t Freud take cocaine? Was heroin worse for you than automobile exhaust? Cars were legal.