The Love Children (20 page)

“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 take 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.

To our adolescent eyes, such hypocrisies were absurd. We used to ask if there were things we felt were really immoral, and we all agreed that hurting people and stealing and killing were bad. But Bishop said, “My brothers have killed people in Vietnam.” And Sandy said, “And the state executes people.” The same contradictions applied to stealing and just about everything else. We couldn't get out of our conundrum.

There were no absolute guides to a good life, we decided, only tentative ones. But in our late teens, that was enough.

 

Maybe Mrs. Connolly sensed that we didn't judge; maybe that's why she didn't resent our poking our noses into her life. She sat on her shabby Victorian couch in her once stylish dress, with the diamond pin on her shoulder that her husband had given her for
their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The diamond earrings he gave her for her fiftieth birthday sparkled through her pale blue hair, which looked professionally set. She wore blush and lipstick and mascara. She poured the tea with perfect manners, offering lemon or cream and passing us plates of cookies.

Maggie and Francis and the children were wonderful, she enthused, and had a new baby. They had just bought a house in Auburn, with lots of trees and a huge yard and a two-car garage and a big porch that girdled the house. “Wonderful!” she proclaimed, without reference to the mansion she'd lost. And Gus was back from Vietnam, with just the slightest limp. He was living in California, stationed at a base there. Married.

“Oh! Did you go to the wedding?” Sandy asked, smiling in delight.

“Oh, he got married on the other side,” she said vaguely.

“In Vietnam?”

“Yes.”

“Have you met her? His new wife? What's her name?”

“No. He'll bring her here to meet us when he gets leave. After John gets home.”

“What's her name?” I repeated, relentlessly.

“Phuket.”

Oh.

The other boys were fine: Eugene was still in high school, Billy was getting all A's in college.

Wonderful.

We chatted about the weather, asked more questions about the children, avoided politics, and only at the end slipped Bishop's name into the conversation. A shadow passed over her face. She did not say she was expecting him for Christmas. Her favorite son was gone.

We had parked right in front of the house this time, which was good, because it was freezing cold that day. Lloyd and Billy
walked us down to the street and were fascinated by my little Fiat. When I told them about kids on my block who had come over to admire it and had lifted the car off the ground, laughing madly, they tried to do the same. But there were only two of them, and they couldn't get traction on the snowy street; they slipped and fell over the car and collapsed laughing. I glanced up at the third-floor windows and saw Mrs. Connolly standing there, watching us. She smiled when she saw me and waved, and I waved back, but I was embarrassed. I don't know why.

 

Mom tried to make Christmas cheerful for me by inviting people. But when she told me she'd asked Eve Goodman and Alyssa, I commented glumly that Christmas would be a day for ghouls: Eve was still mourning Danny, and Alyssa was still mourning Tim, who had died the year before. I said I might spend Christmas with Daddy. I threw this at her like a hardball, just to be mean. I didn't want to go to Daddy's and I don't know why I felt I had to punish Mom. I guess I was mad at her for hurting Philo.

She blanched and said, “Why don't you invite Sandy and her parents? And Steve, if you can find him. Whomever you want.”

This soothed me a bit, and I set out to make something of the day. Luckily, Sandy and the rest of the Lipkin family had no plans for a holiday they didn't celebrate, and they were happy to come. Their presence saved the holiday for me. I couldn't find Steve; the number he'd given me had been disconnected. But when I called Dolores's house, amazingly, I got her! She sounded subdued, drugged out, but she said she'd love to come. Something told me not to invite her family. Mom also invited Annette and Ted and Lisa Fields. So we would be ten for dinner: a proper Christmas.