by Ian Woollen
Anthony eyed his half-brother and said, “I’ve discovered that dad isn’t my dad. Ward isn’t my father. He is your and Duncan’s father, but not mine.”
“You’re saying that mom was sleeping around?” Rob whispered.
“Evidently.”
Anthony and Trip’s expectation about Rob’s open mind was a miscalculation. Despite his ongoing differences with Ward and Mary over the Rokeby bullshit, Rob could not fathom the idea of his mother ….
The postcards came less often.
Slowly, Rob and Geneva did start seeing Ward and Mary for more than just a wave on the road. A once-a-summer luncheon, but never at Miss Ina’s Cabin. They showed up for a spread on the cottage porch at Zippy Cove. The conversation was fairly predictable. It would start with Ward and Mary fawning over the beautiful Geneva, because after all, it wasn’t her fault that their rogue, drop-out kid had lured her into a life of debauchery. Mary admired Geneva’s healthy, rosy cheeks and her fortitude for putting up with their scrawny son, who obviously needed to eat more of his mother’s cooking.
Ward described Duncan’s achievements at I.U. and his many innovations with Wangert Public Relations. Mary would add her account of Kathryn’s latest triumph at the music school. Rob would signal that he was tired of this subject by lobbing in a crack about Duncan’s political pandering. Ward would ask a few questions about the gardening business. Rob and Geneva would boast of their innovation in constructing raised beds over buried wire mesh to prevent the voles and rabbits from eating their clients’ vegetables.
Mary reminisced about Clyde and the winter that she and Ward spent on the island. Her stories invariably led to a comment about baby Anthony and a sudden welling up of tears. She fled to the kitchen. Geneva would follow her to provide a womanly embrace, leaving Ward and Rob to stare awkwardly out at the water.
Next came Ward’s big annual offer: “I know winters out here can get mighty depressing. And if you and Geneva ever feel like you’d want to come home and go to college together, I’m sure we could make the arrangements.”
“Sounds like you’re talking about funeral arrangements,” Rob said.
“No, not what I meant at all, son,” Ward blustered.
“It would feel like a funeral to me,” Rob explained. “Believe it or not, I’ve come to like winters out here. We hunker down. Plan our gardens. Grandma Loretta would be proud of me.”
In the kitchen, Mary eyeballed Geneva and whispered, “I don’t know why things turn out the way they do. We all had the best of intentions.”
Chapter 64
Baby
The typical course of these meetings changed in 1985. Just a few days before, Geneva told Rob she was pregnant. At least a couple months pregnant. It was during a discussion about fertilizer. They were hauling carts of gooey seaweed up from the shore to spread across a freshly planted asparagus patch.
She said, “What would you think if we were to get pregnant?”
“I’d think we must have been asking for it.”
“You’d wouldn’t be upset or scared?”
“Upset, no. A little scared, yeah. Because I get the impression that you’re telling me we are knocked up,” Rob said.
“We don’t have to go through with it.”
Rob paused and put down the seaweed cart. He grinned. “Hey, we’re gardeners. We plant seeds. They grow. We’ll probably have to find a bigger place, or we could add a room to Miss Ina’s.”
“The schoolteacher will be happy to add another student,” Geneva said.
“My parents will think we’re crazy” Rob said. “Unmarried, no college degree, just another example of being young and reckless.”
At the start of the 1985 luncheon, just before the part where Mary gushed over Geneva’s rosy cheeks, Rob cut in with, “I have an important announcement to make. Geneva is pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”
It struck like a meteor. Mary jumped and hooted with joy. She poked at Ward’s cheeks and rubbed his balding pate, as if she thought he needed encouragement to join the revelry. Excitement about becoming a grandparent consumed him as quickly as it did her. Biology was their salvation. All was forgiven. No lectures on getting married.
Ward’s sagging cheeks flushed and glowed with tears and spread into a grin. He walloped his son on the back and arms. Rob was catapulted from the status of black-sheep disappointment to the bright star of the family’s future. Suddenly he and Geneva were geniuses for choosing the perfect lifestyle for the safe, natural upbringing of the Wangert heir.
“I was just reading an article in the Family Therapy Networker,” Mary said, “that cites research on bonding time between fathers and infants, which has diminished steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The single most effective way to change the world is for fathers to spend more time with infants, and Rob, I’m so happy to know that’s exactly what you’ll be able to give our island baby.”
“Winterize,” Ward chimed in. “We’ll winterize the house so we can spend more time out here.”
The attention was almost too much. Mary showed up at Miss Ina’s cabin the next day with a mountain of groceries that Rob and Geneva had no place to shelve. She also brought a rocking chair from her cottage bedroom. Rob, fresh from his morning bong-hit, stared comically and cosmically at the chair that had rocked him as an infant.
Rob lowered himself cautiously onto the cane seat, as if into the lap of future conceptions. Very freaky.
“Oh, don’t worry about breaking it,” Mary said. “That chair was built to hold plenty of weight.”
To demonstrate, Mary plopped herself down on Rob’s knee. It was silly at first. They all laughed at the role reversal. Rob said, “Where’s Rusalka and her camera when you need it?”
Mary said, “There’s one in my purse. Grab it. Yes, get a picture of this! My colleagues would find this very amusing.”
Mary pretended to be a baby. She kicked her heels at Rob’s legs and threw up her arms and mimicked an infantile cry. Rob said, “Okay! I get you’re trying to show me that caring for a baby is a big deal!”
Mary nodded and sighed, “And I get that you two understand the seriousness, because unlike my generation, you really do have the option not to have this baby. I’m proud of you for going forward.”
If Rob wanted to hear it, or see the faraway pain in his mother’s face, this was a hint that Anthony’s wild assertion might have some merit. Rob could only see the age-lines in Mary’s skin and neck, and after Geneva clicked the picture, he struggled instead with the fact that his mother was not moving off his lap and that the silly moment had turned serious.
Geneva asked, “In your counseling work, do you talk about dreams?”
Mary answered, “Sometimes, but not always.”
“I had a dream about the baby last night,” Geneva said. “We were all down at the pond and the baby was swimming out at the float just like everyone. I sensed there was something dangerous in the water. I couldn’t see it, like the eels we hear about, but never see.”
Rob said, “The baby is swimming around inside your tummy.”
“In the amniotic fluid,” Mary said.
“And the danger I couldn’t see?” Geneva asked.
“God only knows,” Mary sighed. “It’s all around us.”
Rob nervously admitted, “I’ve got this image of you as my mother, and as a therapist, I guess, being able to fix everything.”
“Thank you, Rob. I wish it were true.”
Geneva said, “These people you see in counseling … I mean, whatever the problem is, it can be helped, right? They eventually get better.”
Mary shook her head. “Some hurts are too deep.”
“Like with Rusalka?” Rob asked.
He saw his mother flinch. She said, “It’s the worst part of becoming a parent. You think you can protect your child from the world, but no.”
This conversation took some of the glow off the pregnancy. It launched darker musings for Rob and Geneva. Geneva re
sponded by focusing obsessively on cleanliness and health, on eating and sleeping, on ambient chimes rather than the Pretenders, on no more bong-hits.
Rob responded with many more bong-hits. And long, rambling soliloquies about the soul-killing machinations of corporate music. One day he crowed about Great Tusk as a haven for the true individual, and the next day Great Tusk was just as fraught with back-biting. One day the human body was a manifestation of star energy, the next it was mortality’s curse.
Geneva tried to listen supportively. It was hard for her to soberly follow his stoned mind’s twists and turns. She would add a comment, but it was always too late; he was already on to another profound observation about charting their baby’s horoscope or the prismatic colors of the crushed mussel shells in their garden paths.
Rob sensed her frustration, and concerned about her eventual disapproval of his toke-time, he did it in private. A joint in the woods of an evening. Talking to the moon. Running sometimes. A dodge-and-duck game with the trees. Nestling flat on fragrant needle turf, or curling up in the deer beds among the silvery spleenworts. The rustle of boughs suggesting a small voice in the wind. Which could lead to more God thoughts and whispered prayers for the baby, as if whispering had a better chance to be heard. His rambles began to take him to the small white church on the hill above town.
He sat alone in the back pew, thumbing through a musty hymnal, trying to find the tunes he remembered from choirboy days and what the hell, singing out loud. “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come!” One evening, he burst from the woods and up the church steps and through the entrance to discover that he was not alone. Another body sat hunched midway to the altar. A man wearing a beret. The man turned.
Ward and Rob faced off, as if having just stumbled into the bathroom to find the other naked on the john. “Oh, sorry,” Rob said.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Ward replied.
In the abbreviated way that men apologize to each other, this exchange covered a lot of ground.
“I’m interrupting you,” Rob said.
“Not really,” Ward said. “As a matter of fact, I was just, uh, thinking about you and remembering how hard it can be for a fellow in your position, waiting out a pregnancy. I mean, sure, Geneva has the main job carrying the baby. But your position isn’t exactly easy.”
“Yeah,” Rob agreed. He sidled forward and sat down next to his father. He closed his eyes and experienced his body running away, racing out of the church and back into the woods, but when he opened his eyes, Ward was still there.
“We end up doing things like sitting alone in church pews, praying,” Ward said.
“And singing old hymns out loud.”
“And feeling like everything is out of our hands, so might as well turn it over to some bigger hands.”
“It’s not like I’ve become religious,” Rob clarified.
“I know what you mean. It’s just wanting to say something to whatever the heck is out there that might be able to bring your kid and family through this,” Ward said.
“My family,” Rob echoed.
“Yes,” Ward said.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. The light faded. Ward said, “About our problems over leaving Rokeby—”
“That’s old news, Dad.”
Chapter 65
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified took note of the diminished content in the Wangert reports. Uninteresting drivel. Something must have happened to the Indy source. She must have lost her inside channels. He picked up the phone to order a replacement. Instead he made a drastic choice. Time to close the Wangert file.
It had to be done. Circumstances demanded a bold move. An unexpected revival of his political prospects forced his hand. Powerful people within the system urged him to enter the field. By virtue of being ‘last man standing’ among the Old Guard, and aided by his craggy, statesman-like bearing, he was receiving more attention from the professionals who assured him that the health issue could be easily smoothed over and that a tip-top campaign would be carefully packaged such that all he needed to do was show up. They didn’t know about the Wangerts. None of the big players knew about the Wangerts. And it was time to make sure that nobody ever did.
Gazing down at Anthony in the park on a rainy afternoon, He Who Remains Classified briefly pondered the possibility that it was all a non-issue. If he and the Wangerts could just establish a frank, open, amicable relationship, nobody would care. Except for one big problem. The gay problem. It was a deal-breaker. The party bigwigs would blow a gasket about his kid being a poofer. He could at least go with the tried-and-true agency method for dealing with problematic evidence—destroy it. Erase it.
He Who Remains Classified reached under his desk and turned on his shredder, ten times more powerful than any of the old machines. He uncapped the Scotch bottle and gulped until his hands stopped trembling. He slowly, wistfully fed the yellowing contents of the enormous Wangert file into the shredder. One last time he savored a report on the 1964 holiday dinner with the boys dressed up like elves. One last time he stared at the photograph of Mary sunning on the patio.
Chapter 66
Family Reunion
Rob and Geneva politely turned down an offer from his parents to buy a house in town, one closer to the ferry for quicker access to the mainland hospital. In the spirit of celebrating the limelight, or maybe just wanting to rub it in Duncan’s face, Rob and Geneva did accept plane tickets to Indianapolis for a baby shower at Christmas.
After Geneva researched pregnancy and flying, they switched from plane travel to a car rental. Rob pointed out that driving also worked better for bringing the baby presents home.
Geneva had never traveled more than two hours distance from Great Tusk. She’d once visited Wolf’s commune near Skowhegan. Feeling a little nauseated, she curled up on Rob’s shoulder. She nibbled on granola bars.
Orienting to the mainland wasn’t easy for him either. Especially stoned. His top speed in a vehicle the last few years had been no more than twenty miles per hour. Cars flew by. Nobody waved. Fewer long-hairs in the gas stations. Everybody paid with credit cards. Rob decided to stick with the back roads. He suggested stopping at Wolf’s place the first night out.
Geneva said, “I’d love to, but I think we’d better push on. If we stop at Wolf’s and start partying and dancing, one day will become two days which will turn into three days, and I’m just afraid that’s as far as we’ll get.”
“Good point,” Rob admitted. “Do you want to drive for a while?”
“I can’t,” she said glumly. “I have a confession to make. I don’t have a license.”
“You don’t have a driver’s license? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You never asked.”
“I’m supposed to ask if you have a driver’s license?” Rob said.
“Who needs one on Great Tusk?”
When they came to the White Mountains, her mood improved. Geneva sat up and began to gawk at the scenery. Her “eating for two” appetite returned. Geneva temporarily loosened her diet restrictions and requested a stop at every Dunkin’ Donuts. Rob recounted the stops on his childhood trips east. Geneva ceremoniously consumed a jelly roll for Duncan, a cruller for Anthony, a glazed for Rob. When they hit the Adirondacks, her craving turned to creamed cheese. They spent the night at a Howard Johnson outside Utica. They argued over the TV channels. The next day it was outlet malls. “I just want to see what maternity clothes are available,” she said.
The farther he journeyed away from the island, the more Rob began to waiver in his hippie certainties. As a Wangert, he had certainly come down in the world, and the closer they got to Indianapolis, the more he felt like a hick. Watching Geneva waddle in and out of the mall stores, Rob questioned whether he had really chosen this life or whether the stars had chosen it for him. While she was in the stores, he muffled these thoughts with a small, stealthily utilized one-hit pipe and a quarter-ounce stash.
“Chicago is more the place for that, and I don’t think they’re called ‘skyscrapers’ anymore. Because they built so many that all the sky has been scraped away.”
“You’re pulling my leg. Is a detour to Chicago possible?” Geneva said, reaching for the map.
“We wouldn’t get to Indy till midnight,” Rob said. “Are you sure you’re not just feeling a bit nervous about seeing Duncan again?”
“No shit,” Geneva said.
Rob thought about her Chicago idea and said, “Maybe getting in at midnight would be better. Frankly, I’m a bit scared about plunking right down into the middle of a family dinner, with all the Duncan and Kathryn crap. If we get there at midnight, we can go right to bed, get a good night’s sleep, and deal with them in the morning. At the breakfast table, it will be more relaxed.”
The Wangert breakfast table provided a frowsy détente. Historically, whatever trouble the boys had created the day before was ignored. Everyone had their roles. Duncan poured the juice. Ward made the toast. Rob set out the cereal boxes and bowls.
It all worked as well as ever. Anthony wasn’t downstairs yet. Geneva showed off her new bathrobe. Kathryn assisted Mary with the coffee. Mary stepped outside to fill the birdfeeder. Geneva and Kathryn yawned contentedly. The breakfast ballet developed in front of a curtain of snow outside the windows. Duncan retrieved Geneva’s napkin for her when it fell off her lap. His dog curled up under the table.
“We’ve been trying for a baby too, but getting pregnant isn’t as easy as I thought it would be,” Kathryn announced.
“At least the trying part is fun,” Geneva replied.
“Not when it feels like the infertility doc is watching over your shoulder,” Kathryn said.