by Ian Woollen
“Yikes. That’s tough,” Rob said. “How did Dad make it through? He must be smarter than we think.”
Anthony discussed his plans for a column in the Yale Daily on the danger of an aging nuclear arsenal, citing a litany of statistics. Deftly guiding the boat around the ledges at the weir, Anthony prattled on about the front-page feature on acid fog that Breezy had just written for the Bangor paper.
“What do you think about all that?” Anthony finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Rob said.
“You must have an opinion of some kind,” Anthony said.
Cowed by the brilliance of the stars and his brother, Rob sputtered, “I know what Duncan would say—that you’ve been spending too much time with Kathryn’s commie father.”
Anthony laughed and asked again, “Okay, but what do you think?”
Occasionally, midnight’s reflected clarity can be as intense as noon. The stars briefly burned through to the void underlying Rob’s adolescent mind. He sat up abruptly, rocking the boat, and announced, “I don’t know. Really, I don’t know what I think. Except that the spinning top in the Skittles game, bouncing around from room to room on the board, reminds me of the way Mom gets before parties.”
Rob began driving loops around the island on the narrow, washboard road. He packed lunch and his guitar. Hikers waved and accepted rides to the ferry or the campground. Rob didn’t talk much to his passengers. He felt more serious that way. He kept his eyes scanning the rutted road ahead. Each day he’d stop to eat at one of the scenic overlooks. Rob stayed inside the vehicle to eat, not wanting to break the connection. He felt like a person with opinions inside his Jeep. And he knew that eventually these long, slow loops would lead to an encounter with Geneva. He wanted her to see him behind the wheel.
It happened near the end of the paved section at the pond. Geneva was driving a flatbed truck. They pulled up next to each other in the middle of the road. Rob dangled his elbow out the window. Geneva had just come from a quick swim. Her hair was tied back with a shoelace. Water droplets glistened on her chin and eyelashes. No more pigtails.
Eyeing Rob and his guitar, Geneva said, “You been learning a few cowboy chords?”
He nodded and displayed the calluses on his fingertips. “I always carry a pick in my wallet,” he said.
She said, “When is Duncan coming?”
A fair enough question, but one that put Rob in a grating position between competing internal frustrations with his brother and this dripping mermaid. Rob answered with the rude truth, “He’s not. He’s with his girlfriend on Nantucket.”
Rob had not bargained for the look of intense pain on Geneva’s face. It catapulted him to a level of emotional turmoil that messed with his teenage head even more than the death of his grandparents, more than lacrosse camp and the night sail.
Before he had a chance to say anything more, Geneva demonstrated her own mastery of the connection between human and automobile. She gunned her engine and simultaneously kicked it into gear, while stepping on the brake, creating a tire spinning cloud of exhaust and grit and burning rubber stink, then releasing the brake and peeling out, rear frame shimmying and shaking, leaving dark, arabesque J-strokes implanted in the pavement that Rob would now have to drive ten miles out of his way to avoid seeing.
Chapter 48
Kathryn and the Disco Ball
The acquisition of a fake ID was an important achievement for adolescents in the 1970s, especially if a guy could score one for his girlfriend too. For Kathryn, alcohol was not the goal. It was about entry to discos. Her boyfriend’s sneakiness allowed her to regularly bask in the shimmering glow of a marvelous discovery, the disco ball.
Kathryn’s devotion to music did not extend to the popular realm until the emergence of disco. As a kid at slumber parties, she liked dancing to records, but the music of the 1960s was overwrought with politics, which reminded her too much of her activist father. She preferred her popular-music dancing to be unadulterated with any message and underscored by a frenetic beat.
Kathryn’s taste in freeform dancing made it easy for Duncan to participate. He didn’t need to know any steps. He didn’t need to lead or follow. All he had to do, beer in hand, was stand and sway, admiring the lights and the outfits, while Kathryn spun around him, working herself into a froth that eventually led to sex. Kathryn believed the strength of a relationship depended on an ever-growing number of tricks. In this situation, it was her ability, after a half hour of nonstop mob motion, swinging in and out on Duncan’s hip, to finally slide up onto his bent knee and gaze into his eyes and orgasm.
The fake IDs themselves accorded Duncan and Kathryn another trick. The IDs were secured through Teddy Van Kelp. He knew a guy who knew a guy in Brooklyn who worked in a print shop. Teddy, son of a high profile trial lawyer, believed that legally—rather than manipulate an official state document, such as a driver’s license—he and Duncan would be less liable to prosecution if their fake IDs were complete fabrications. Conveniently, the Brooklyn guy specialized in passports. Teddy ordered up three very official-looking passports for a fictional country called “Balenia.”
“Bar bouncers are never the sharpest knives in the drawer. One glance at these beauties, and they’ll wave us in,” Teddy assured Duncan and Kathryn.
For the most part, the Balenian passports worked well. Teddy hadn’t counted on the bar bouncers asking curious questions. For instance, where is Balenia? Kathryn and Duncan developed a fanciful script about the landscape and culture of Balenia, a small Scandinavian nation near the Arctic Circle, where Kathryn’s biological parents lived in a yurt.
“Do you attribute Kathryn’s public fighting style to Balenian culture? Or is that just her being a diva-in-training?” Teddy teased Duncan, on the day after another jealous spat over a townie actress at the Rokeby Theater, which Teddy had to mediate, again.
“That’s her being a diva-in-training,” Duncan agreed.
Her jealous squalls blew in regularly, over this or that. They were never directly addressed to Duncan. He always heard from somebody else that Kathryn was mad at him. Third parties would gossip and intervene, and that adjudication somehow made it okay for Kathryn not to be mad anymore.
When Duncan finally brought Kathryn out to Indianapolis the following spring to meet his parents and visit the I.U. Music School, the trip was prefaced with a series of letters between Mary and Breezy and Lana.
Mary Wangert was happy to reciprocate the hospitality that Lana and Randolph had extended to her sons. She felt a bit nervous when both Breezy and Lana sent on long ‘dos and don’ts’ lists, regarding interactions with Kathryn. Do have hair-curling equipment handy. Do not allow her to put sugar on her grapefruit. Lana even included the phone number for Kathryn’s child psychiatrist.
Mary, now deep into her own therapy, felt sympathetic to Kathryn as the latest interloper in the Wangert boys’ club.
Duncan, sporting long sideburns, introduced his girlfriend to his parents as “my companion in world domination.” Kathryn certainly looked the part, fresh from a New York stylist, with jagged bangs that hung down over one eye and were periodically tucked back over an ear. Clutching Duncan’s arm, she made an immediate impression with a house-gift, a Japanese ‘Madame Butterfly’ doll.
“Thank you. It’s stunning,” Mary said, “My father—although you wouldn’t know it to look at him—was a big Puccini fan.”
Kathryn said, “Duncan told me that you got us tickets for Madama Butterfly in Bloomington tomorrow night.”
“I’ve never seen a doll so beautiful,” Mary said. “Just yesterday in my therapy session, we were discussing Russian nesting dolls.”
“I have a collection of international dolls that came from a ’round the world cruise with my parents when I was five,” Kathryn explained.
Mary ushered her guest into her living room and placed the doll in a prominent position on the mantle above the fireplace. The house smelled of lemon wax. Duncan and Ward rolled in the tea
tray. Rusalka and Ruby, wearing matching dashikis, arrived at the front door with a cleaned-up Vincent and Kayla. The men poured drinks and passed the Special K-bars, while the ladies convened to coo over the visitor and support Mary.
Kathryn sat down at the piano. As long as Duncan could remember, the Steinway grand served only as a display surface for large vases of flowers and silver-framed photographs.
“No one in this family has played that instrument since Aunt Gertrude,” Ward said.
“Who’s Aunt Gertrude?” Duncan asked.
“A cousin of your grandmother’s,” Ward said.
“It’s the same in my family.” Kathryn smiled and tucked her bangs behind an ear. “I’m always hearing about relatives I didn’t even know existed.”
Duncan elbowed a speechless Vincent, to keep him from drooling.
“The piano was tuned for your arrival,” Mary said. “We were hoping you might play something,” Ruby added.
She played and sang, accompanied and unaccompanied, at the piano and in her bedroom, several times throughout the weekend. Often as a signal for yet another change of clothes. Her gowns and music and perfume filled the Wangert house with a silky ebullience that reminded Ward of an earlier era.
The ‘dos and don’ts’ list was quickly forgotten, especially by Rusalka and Ruby, who happily responded to Kathryn’s rather direct questions about lesbian life in Indianapolis.
They all attended the opera in Bloomington. Kathryn was very impressed with the I.U. Music School’s facilities, from the well-trod, rosin-infused practice building to the colorful new opera house. The performance of Madama Butterfly was superb. The appreciative audience clapped and bravoed at the traditional moments. The students in the third balcony cheered raucously for their compatriots onstage and in the orchestra pit.
Kathryn’s visit provided material for several of Mary’s subsequent therapy sessions. She examined her ambivalence about accepting another female into the clan. She spent at least two sessions dissecting Duncan’s surprisingly solicitous behavior with his girlfriend. Kathryn’s effusive two-page thank-you note was read aloud in session and analyzed for signs of an adopted child’s projections.
Chapter 49
Working Through
After the shortened summer on Great Tusk, hungry for immediate aid, Mary dug through her drawer of important papers to find the name of the psychologist recommended by Dr. Keller.
“You were referred to me by Keller how many years ago?” Dr. Brian Gordon asked on the phone.
Mary couldn’t cite the exact number. “A lot,” she said.
“You definitely deserve a commendation for that,” he said. “Unfortunately my caseload is full.”
He passed her on to a young master’s-level therapist in his office with the advice, “You don’t need a Ferrari to drive to the store for bread.”
Mary resisted the pant-suited Regina Auer at first. She longed for the shaggy uniqueness of Dr. Keller. Regina Auer was a good-enough therapist. No more, no less. Regina offered to “work through” the lingering transference on Dr. Keller. “Working through” was her mantra. The only flashy thing about Regina was her tape recorder. Regina audiotaped each session and sent the cassette home with Mary to review.
The cassettes slowly piled up on a shelf in Mary’s dressing closet. She never listened to them. The cassettes, as physical objects, represented the hope of containing her depressive struggle. The Tuesday and Friday appointments kept showing up on the kitchen calendar and Mary kept showing up for the sessions in a glass-sheathed building near the outer loop, not far from the overpass where her parents plunged to their deaths. Sometimes she felt like a sleepwalker plodding to and from Regina’s office. Like her departed mother, whose habits were becoming more prevalent in Mary’s life, she felt guilty about wasting cassette space, so she planned ahead about how to fill the tapes.
“Today I want to talk about Loretta’s brief attempt to teach the lessons in White Gloves and Party Manners ….”
“Today I’d like to talk about my friend, Rusalka, who feeds me Valium ….”
“Today, I want to discuss my childhood friend, Ruby, who is in a lesbian relationship with Rusalka. Ruby was studying to be ordained as an Episcopalian priest when she and Rusalka made their preferences known, and this indirectly caused the minister at our church to be fired, which was a blow to my husband and to Ruby, who is now becoming a Unitarian. The fact that Ruby is lesbian isn’t necessarily a big surprise, because when Ruby and I were little girls ….”
“I want to focus on my husband teasing me now that my boys are gone, teasing me in the same ways they did. For example, whenever I try to cook pork chops, he says, ‘Thanks for saving us from trichinosis’ ….”
“Today I want to talk about a man who I thought was going to be my first husband, but whose name I can’t mention, even though I know this is confidential ….”
When Rusalka and Ruby asked Mary about her therapy, she answered, “Regina says that very often things get worse before they get better.”
The getting-worse part was Mary’s withdrawal from her social sphere, in favor of long hours reading books about psychotherapy in the backyard bomb shelter. She stopped attending the Ladies’ Literary Salon and dropped her membership in the Dramatic Club. She did sign up for a yoga class with Rusalka and Ruby, but only to convey that she was not judging their affair. When Rusalka and Ruby urged her to join their women’s encounter group, she answered, “Regina says I’m not ready yet.”
“Ridiculousness,” Rusalka scoffed privately to Ward at the office. “Suddenly everything in backseat to sessions.”
“Let’s remember, this is what we thought she needed,” Ward counseled.
“At least she doesn’t seem too distraught by Rob leaving for boarding school,” Ruby said. “Vincent and Kayla are having a harder time with that. What about all her time in the bomb shelter? Doesn’t that seem strange?”
Ward said, “It was where the kids used to play.”
“Does she tell you what’s going on in therapy?” Ruby pressed.
“A little bit. The last session was some kind of empty-chair exercise, conversing with her father,” Ward shrugged, unsure how much to reveal and trying to hide his own concerns about his wife’s rewiring process.
“Have you offered to go to a session with her?” Ruby asked.
“Yes, several times. She reassures me that I’m not the main problem. She says maybe later.”
Rusalka’s eyes bugged brightly. She announced, “This is answer: snitch couple of cassette tapes from closet. You find out what is really going on!”
Ruby waved a finger emphatically. “Oh, no, no! Don’t even think about it, Ward!”
Ward had already thought about it. The temptation was powerful and disturbing. He was surprised at how often his thoughts turned to the pile of cassettes at the back of his wife’s closet. When Mary went out, he stepped into her closet and stared at them. Red, green, black. His mind tried attaching significance to the colors of the cassettes. Mary described every session to him, yet despite her forthrightness and however much she revealed, Ward always found himself imagining there must be more.
Daily, Ward squashed these niggling fears. He worked weekends. He visited his mother in her nursing home and took flowers to Meemo’s grave. Ironically, the same moral muscle that squashed any action on the cassettes also squashed any inclination toward mentioning his fears to Mary. It might have helped him get a clearer picture of their nature. The fears were really more about him—fears of what was being said about him in therapy. That he sounded like a broken record, always complaining about Wangert Public Relations becoming exactly the business his grandfather didn’t want—two-bit lobbying shop representing strip club owners fending off indecency laws—that middle age was treating him badly, that some mornings he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror. A discussion with Mary could have helped him realize that the departure of their children was having a significant effect on him too.
&
nbsp; At night, wandering to and from the bathroom at 3 a.m.—his bladder required more frequent emptying—he ended up in Anthony’s room or Rob and Duncan’s room, or more recently, his parents’ bedroom. The master suite was a damask diorama of mid-century, Midwestern affluence. It remained virtually unchanged because his mother insisted on preserving her late husband’s effects and because Constance and Ward and Mary were all maintaining the cheery fiction that Constance’s stay in the nursing home was temporary.
Ward wandered half-asleep into his father’s dressing closet and made the alarming discovery that, thanks to his added girth, he fit easily into the tailored suits. Part of the alarm was that the suits felt so good. Underneath the smell of mothballs lingered a scent of cigar and Bay Rum. His nocturnal peregrinations brought him back repeatedly, back to a riddle posed by the antique bedroom: why did his widowed mother never remarry? She certainly had chances. There were several gentlemen-callers from church who seemed much more attentive than his father had ever been.
Ward’s dim view of the stolid old chief depended on a set of memories that slowly began to shift, as Ward, at first just for fun, wore the double-breasted suits out in public. He recalled the incident with the Chicago prostitute when Ward was Anthony’s age and about to start Yale. It was at the Drake Hotel, during a father-son trip to buy clothes for college. Ward had been so thrown by the offer of procurement. Only now, conscious of his own concerns for Anthony’s start in New Haven, did Ward realize that his father was awkwardly caught in the same filial throes, and was probably reenacting what the governor had done for him.
Public reactions to Ward’s big-shoulders wardrobe, including the fat ties and braces, ranged from Mary’s laughter to a few gasps from geezers at the Statehouse to admiring murmurs from prospective, small-town clients who figured Ward must be one of the last of the old-style operators. Costumed thus, Ward found himself effectively channeling his father’s hearty style with Rusalka and his office staff. And with no children waiting around the dinner table of an evening, he lingered downtown after work for a drink or two at the Columbia Club with other graying businessmen. They commiserated over stagflation and the fate of American Motors. They discussed back surgeries and bifocals.