Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb

by Ian Woollen

  “You’re rather handsome yourself, buster,” Mary said.

  Ward said, “You look familiar. Did we go to Sunday school together?”

  “And dancing school too,” Mary smiled, “back in good ol’ Indianapolis.”

  “How about we get married?” Ward suggested. “We’ll move home and have three sons and tend the flame of America’s heartland.”

  Mary Stark Wangert chimed in, “A wonderful idea. First, how about I take a brief detour to Moscow and have a fling with a much darker side of the American soul?”

  Ward answered, “Yes, but at the time, you won’t know that. At the time you’ll think you’re fighting the good fight against godless Communism.”

  Mary added, “And then you can come and rescue me from those delusions and we can both learn the meaning of the word, ‘forgiveness.’ ”

  “Or try to,” Ward said.

  Mary nodded, “So years later when our sons grow up and make their own bad choices, we won’t blame ourselves or them.”

  Ward broke the spell slightly. “I don’t know about that. We can at least hope that if they’re lucky, something good might come out of their own delusions.”

  Mary laid her head against her husband’s chest. They moved into an embrace and a swaying motion and the crowd opened appreciatively and made room for them on the floor. Someone dropped a Count Basie cassette into the tape deck and cranked it up.

  Ward said, “I guess we’ll have to show them how it’s done.”

  “Aren’t you glad I brought a matching slip and undergarments?” Mary said.

  Risking life and limb, for both themselves and the observers, Ward and Mary proceeded to demonstrate an acrobatic roadhouse swing.

  At dinner Anthony was equally jazzed about his prospects post-graduation. He described his and Trip’s plan to move to Washington, D.C., and work as investigative journalists. Blissfully unaware that the newspaper industry was beginning a long slide, they loudly committed themselves to revealing the shadowy workings of the federal government, especially in regard to the arms race. They were going to become the next Woodward and Bernstein. Anthony’s fervency was certainly genuine, but it was also a voluble display meant to illustrate for his parents how excited he was about Trip, in hopes that they would feel the same way toward his friend. His more than friend—his partner, his lover.

  He practiced saying it out loud before dinner, always with a catch in his throat. With his peers, Anthony felt okay being ‘out.’ But with his parents it still felt impossible. He had always felt an unnerving distance, a physical sense of difference. Coming out to his parents would be like ripping off a hundred Band-Aids. He claimed to be experiencing his childhood nightmare again, the giant explosions, the fireball.

  Trip wasn’t buying it. Trip was taking it personally. He claimed Anthony was not fully committed to their relationship and that’s what prevented him coming out to his parents. He gave Anthony an ultimatum: “You tell them before we move to Washington, or else.” Anthony had promised to do it this weekend.

  First, another glass of wine and inquiries about Rusalka and Ruby, to bring up an example of a positive gay relationship. First, direct his parents’ attention to the lovely banners hanging from the Commons’ rafters. First, try to assuage his parents’ worries about Rob by revealing the postcard poem sent from the Appalachian Trail that clearly indicated the kid was just going through a phase. First, allow Trip and his parents to chat a bit more about their plans for D.C.

  Ward asked, “As investigative journalists, do you have a position with a publication?”

  Trip smiled, “Oh, no. That would compromise our integrity. We’re going to be freelance, in the best sense of the word.”

  “But not in the sense of ‘broke’?” Ward asked.

  “There might be a little of that at the beginning,” Trip admitted. “I have a trust fund that pays me five hundred a month. It came from my bachelor uncle. He died last year—a suicide, actually.”

  Anthony interrupted with a pretend choke on a radish. He waved his napkin in front of his face. This was not the time to tell the story of Trip’s flaming bachelor uncle.

  “Where are you planning to live?” Mary asked.

  “I know the city pretty well,” Trip said. “We’ve got a lead on a sublet near Dupont Circle. At first I think we’ll be crashing with some friends on R Street.”

  Mary laughed, “Oh, it sounds delightful. I would say it sounds like the world is your oyster, except I understand that the oysters have been having a hard time out in Chesapeake Bay.”

  “I don’t know much about that,” Trip said. “Seafood isn’t my favorite.”

  “Oh, yes, the oysters have been having a very hard time lately,” Mary repeated.

  Ward interjected, “I think what Mary is trying to say is that we remember graduating from college full of excitement and a desire to change the world. We may be feeling a little envious, but realistically, it may turn out to be harder than you think.”

  “Not with the people running the show today.” Trip smiled. “They’re sitting ducks. The Republicans are nominating a washed-up Hollywood actor for president. We’ll take them down, no problem, and make our names and fortune doing it.”

  “Oh, for the days of unbridled confidence,” Ward smiled.

  “Here, here!” Mary smiled and raised a glass.

  Anthony sensed their smiles were forced and the toast was solely for his benefit. So before his big announcement, he led the folks over to the reception at Dad’s secret society and poured a little more booze in them.

  The thick gate creaked open. The courtyard of the imposing stone crypt surged with back-slapping alums lifting champagne flutes off the trays of roving waiters. Mary and Ward and Anthony and Trip joined the flow of guests into the great hall where the society’s archivist had created a striking display of old photographs. Table after table of glowing black and white framed 11x14 prints, featuring pom-poms and bobby socks, horn-rimmed glasses, cars with running boards, young men and women in uniform, everyone smoking, hair bobbed, letter sweaters, and lots of lipstick.

  “Oh, my gosh, is that you, Mary!?” Trip pointed.

  Sure enough—at a football game—standing right beside He Who Remains Classified, except that in profile and their age being approximately the same, he looked exactly like Anthony.

  Trip blurted out, “That guy, it’s, it’s you, Anthony. That guy with your mother is a dead ringer for you!”

  Her champagne glass trembled and fell. Ward dropped his too, as he reached for his wife to keep her from collapsing. They dragged her to a leather couch in the corner. “I’m … okay,” Mary protested.

  Anthony stared unmercifully at her then the photograph then back again. “Mother, is there something you want to tell me?” he challenged, no catch in his voice, no give in his eyes.

  What followed was a moment of profound misunderstanding. Mary did not perceive that Anthony wanted the truth, that he would welcome the truth. It would have allowed him enough emotional room to reveal his own to her.

  Ward was closer to recognizing this. No use denying any longer what the photograph made obvious. He saw it was finally time to let Anthony in on the secret. But after demanding Mary’s unqualified support in his own prideful standoff with Rob on Great Tusk, he had to back up her position, however skewed.

  Mary said, “No, nothing. I’m not sure what came over me. Must be something I ate.”

  Anthony knew she was lying. He felt betrayed. His mother was lying to him. Breaking one of their oldest bonds, established in contrast to his chronic liar brothers. He spat it out, like an accusation, “I can be honest. I’ve got something to tell you,” he fumed. “I’m gay. Trip’s gay. We’re lovers. Get it? That’s who I am. That’s who we are. Come visit us in D.C. if you want. And, no, I won’t be making any special flight home to talk this over with you and your therapist. Good-bye.”

  He whirled on Trip, grabbed his hand, and dragged him out into the night.

  Ma
ry rolled into Ward’s arms and cried intermittently while she tried to explain, “I couldn’t do it, not now …. It was the way he was talking at dinner … all that investigative conquering the world business. If I told him, he’d use the information. He’d try to use the information … and it would have gotten him hurt or worse.”

  Chapter 59

  Anthony Re-made

  The information did go to Anthony’s head, although not quite in the way Mary feared. As Trip noted in his journal, “Anthony’s discovery stimulated that peculiar, lower brain stem part of the American psyche hell-bent on being Self Made, which in evolutionary terms is a slightly younger mutation of Born Again.”

  After a long funk, Anthony embraced certain aspects of the revelation that I Am Not Who I Thought I Was. It provided him with emotional license to engage in uncharacteristic practices such as: 1) thoroughly reviewing his wardrobe; 2) going on a shopping spree with his first credit card; 3) flaunting his orientation at an anti-nuke rally on the Washington Mall with Trip; and 4) impulsively convincing his lover that the solution to housing in D.C. was to buy an old Hinckley Sou’wester and rent a slip at a marina near the farthest subway stop.

  Further nosing around in the stacks of the Library of Congress yielded several more photos that confirmed the remarkable likeness. Anthony posed as a researcher with a half-finished dissertation on the diplomatic station in Moscow in the ’50s. The archeological flavor of the search whetted Anthony’s appetite for careful sifting through crumbling reams of data. To most people, a day in a library carrel surrounded by piles of seemingly unrelated, outdated material would not be fun. To Anthony, it was an elixir. He began musing on dates, the exact dates of his mother’s time in Moscow, the wedding in Indianapolis, the fabled winter on Great Tusk. He acquired a copy of his birth certificate and managed to secure the 1952 registration records from the maternity ward at Blue Hill hospital.

  Trip tried to keep him grounded. “You’re becoming like one of those nuts who thinks he’s the long lost offspring of Czar Nicholas II.”

  “But I am,” Anthony insisted, pulling at his beard.

  “It could be just a coincidence,” Trip said. “Do you really think your mother would lie to you? Of course, I know parents fudge the facts with their kids all the time. For years my folks gave me completely conflicting accounts on what led up to their divorce. But you’ve always described your mom with a halo around her head.”

  Anthony winced, “What if she’s denying it to save the marriage? What if Ward doesn’t know anything about it? I don’t want them to split up. Ward isn’t a bad husband, although when I think back, he acted a little different with me than with Rob and Duncan.”

  “Different how?”

  “He treated me easier. His attitude sometimes felt like a kind of wariness. And these checks he’s sending me now, a thousand a month. It’s like he’s trying to buy my silence.”

  “You’re saying he did know that he wasn’t your biological dad?”

  “Maybe unconsciously,” Anthony shrugged.

  Trip said, “Ah, yes, unconsciously … my father’s favorite fallback explanation for everything that required an apology. He actually had cards printed up: ‘Mr. Bedford Forrest Ames regrets his unconscious behavior on the evening of ….’ Fill in the date.”

  As usual, Trip was able to coax a smile from Anthony. They were sitting in the restaurant at the National Gallery. One of several grand, home-away-from-home public spaces they frequented. The sailboat quarters at the marina were tight. They slept in the V-berth up front and took turns dressing, hunkered over in the low cabin. The boat was cozy enough to return to after twelve hours snooping around the capital of the Free World, but not exactly a place to settle. And that was fine for now, as they fancied themselves modern-day flâneurs. Patrolling the broad avenues, imagining who was lurking in the passing limousines, discussing where their investigative powers should be focused. And discovering where to find a good salad. The chef at the National Gallery restaurant made an excellent Cobb salad. Trip was an aficionado. “Nothing that can’t be solved by a good salad,” he claimed.

  “Face the facts,” Trip said. “Your supposed bigwig daddy over there in the State Department is not likely to admit anything either. What are you expecting, for him to welcome you as his heir? No way. And frankly, as far as newsworthiness, what do we really have here? A high government official may have fathered a child out of wedlock a long time ago. Not exactly headline material. It wouldn’t even make the back page.”

  Like Mary, Trip was also worried that Anthony’s nosiness could inadvertently cause dangerous reactions. Just yesterday, a speeding car took a corner too tightly and almost ran them over. Probably a coincidence.

  Anthony sighed and nodded. “At least it helps me look below the surface. Dig for the story underneath. I still think there’s some kind of destiny at work. I mean, for this to come out just before we move to Washington. For his office to be just a few blocks away!”

  “Okay, so let’s use it as motivation,” Trip agreed, “to find a story we can run with. Your anti-nuke cause is losing steam. The atomic age is so passé. The bomb is a rusty dinosaur. Nobody cares about atoms anymore. It’s all about quarks now.”

  “Did we ever hear anything back from the Blade on our pitch about the Plowshares Eight?” Anthony asked.

  Trip shrugged. “They’ve already got somebody on it. Maybe if we got less focused on nukes, you could get less obsessed with your parentage. We should probably be thinking smaller, more local.”

  “And we should probably be thinking about part-time jobs.”

  “Let’s go look at some paintings,” Trip said. A common diversion when feeling overwhelmed by the harsher realities. They disappeared into the dim galleries, in search of their respective favorites. For Trip, that was Benjamin West’s mysterious picture of Colonel Guy Johnson with a shadowy half-naked Mohawk at his shoulder, whispering, pointing the way to the handsome colonel’s true preference. And for Anthony, it was Thomas Eakins’ rowers, The Biglin Brothers Racing. Anthony made Trip promise that when they had enough money and space, they would purchase a reproduction of this painting.

  “It’s us,” Anthony explained, “two guys in the same boat, a narrow, tippy boat, rowing upstream against the tide.”

  “Two soul mates,” Trip said, “with blue handkerchiefs tied on their heads.”

  The blue handkerchiefs tied on their heads became a signature wardrobe feature for Anthony and Trip on the Ivy party circuit. Anthony came out as a dancer too. It was part of the statement. But only with clumsy Trip. They would dance goofy, bouncing shimmies together. It was part of the tacit understanding that they were often the token ‘gay couple’ that added spice to a party. At first the hosts were other Yalies. There was Lucian, who landed a job at the Kennedy Center and a basement apartment in Georgetown. He lived with someone who monitored something about water rights at Interior. There was Missy, who worked for UNESCO and shared a townhouse on Monroe Street with Ashley, who slaved in a back office at an investment bank.

  Gradually, the circle widened. Everett handled constituent calls for his congressman and rented a house with Doug, the Labor Department statistician, across the river in Alexandria. Cynthia dropped out of Randolph-Macon to attend the Culinary Institute. She worked under the dessert chef at a big banquet hotel, and the parties in her Woodley Park studio meant cakes galore.

  As pot gave way to cocaine as the ’80s drug of choice, people talked differently at parties. Less inward musings and more outward ranting. Parties became marathons of vociferousness. This was helpful for Trip and Anthony, two rookie journalists, judiciously sipping wine from paper cups, listening for scoops. They pursued a lead overheard on Everett’s back porch about an eminent domain dispute near Union Station and sold their first piece to the DC Gazette. The potentially big story was overheard repeatedly very late or in the dawn hours during a party’s last whispered gasps, with Anthony and Trip feigning sleep in a corner.

  The
y’d become known affectionately as the ‘Blue Bandana Nomads’ for their habit of crashing on their host’s floor, rather than making the long trek back to the boat. And in exchange, waking early with no ill effects from substances, they tiptoed around other comatose bodies and did a cleanup. Gathering bottles and trash. Stacking dishes. Mopping up spills. Emptying ashtrays. Before they stepped out into a fresh urban morning to compare notes on the night’s eavesdropping. More and more they both overheard mention of a deadly pneumonia that seemed to be affecting gay men.

  Chapter 60

  The Dark Star

  He Who Remains Classified got wind of the incident up in New Haven via the local Georgetown gossip. Purring bureaucrats in tuxedos jumped at the rare opportunity to rib him about the tipsy dame collapsing at the sight of his photograph. Fortunately, nobody in his circles figured out what the lady’s collapse at the Yale reception really meant.

  He Who Remains Classified knew what it meant, and he knew that Anthony knew. Thank God the kid inherited his father’s common sense and wasn’t forcing the issue. At least not yet.

  Long naps, planned and unplanned, dominated his post-recovery days in the office. One morning, forcing himself to stay awake, He Who Remains Classified stepped groggily over to the window to study his favorite birds. His jaw twitched. His chest froze, like an aftershock from his cardiac event. He saw a very strange bird: his homosexual son, standing in the park, staring directly up at him.

  He Who Remains Classified recoiled and slid back away from the window, before realizing that the kid could not possibly see him, due to the recent installation of mirrored, bullet-proof, thermal panes.

  He shivered through more aftershocks from a poisonous thought, unconscionable even by his standards, that his return to the political arena would be easier if his homosexual son was no longer alive.