“Does he know what he’s saying?” Henry Lehman demanded of Caitlin in a completely frantic whisper. She looked at him. Lehman’s face was tense, incredulous, and he thrust it at her like a fist. “My God in heaven, doesn’t your friend know what’s happened to Mr. Welles? The man was caught having sex with a porter, both of them in the President’s private train. Welles is ruined, utterly discredited. Finished. Kaput. By this time tomorrow Sumner Welles will be out of the government, completely out.”
SEPTEMBER 1, 1967
“My own son treats me as if I were an inquisitor, and I end up feeling that maybe he does have something to feel guilty about, something I ought to know.” Caitlin stood at her office’s protractor-shaped window and looked down at the police barricades, loitering cops, and knots of patient citizens waiting for the Labor Day parade, which was still fifty blocks north.
“What kid worth his salt doesn’t have something to hide?” said Gordon.
She turned around to look at him. His ample stomach rested in his fishnet tee shirt like a watermelon in a hammock. He wore a white sailing cap, blue slacks, tennis shoes.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Caitlin said, gesturing at Gordon’s tee shirt.
He looked down at it, as if someone else had dressed him. “No like?” he asked. His smile was missing a left bicuspid.
“Hate,” said Caitlin.
Gordon gestured to a Pan Am flight bag at his feet. “Well, I’m not surprised. I packed an extra, just in case.” He picked up the blue plastic bag, slung it over his shoulder. “In fact, I think I’ll change right now, and then if I can tear you away from your work we can hit the road.”
Gordon changed in the men’s room, and then he and Caitlin walked through the shadowy, deserted offices of the World Refugee Alliance. She had been the only one in. The others were either in their apartments, or at inexpensive places on Long Island like Westhampton or Port Jefferson.
As for Caitlin and Gordon, they were going to drive to Windsor County. Gordon had brought himself a used Fair-lane. Unlike most New Yorkers, Gordon always had a car; he was willing to exert the ceaseless vigilance needed to keep up with the alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules and even paid the shocking fines he sometimes incurred when he overslept fifteen minutes.
“Easy parking today,” he said, escorting Caitlin to his car. There was a smell of burnt coffee in the air; the sky was a pale, cheesy yellow. Caitlin was going through her purse; she had of late developed a nagging fear that she had forgotten something. She poked around a box of Sen-Sen, a packet of Stim-U-Dents, her ring of keys, a compact, an old, half-corroded tube of red lipstick, and then she quickly opened her wallet—thirty dollars in fives, a new Master Charge card, a library card, a membership in the ACLU. She finally had a driver’s license. Five years ago, Gordon had taught her to drive an old Pontiac GTO, which was eventually stolen from in front of his apartment on West Ninety-ninth Street. It was the only car Caitlin had ever driven.
When Caitlin looked up from the inventory of her purse, she saw her son sitting in the back of Gordon’s car. He was wearing an Oxford-cloth blue shirt, which had evidently been thrown in the wash with bleach: it had white streaks down the front. His hair was thick and the longer he grew it the more it raged away from his head, forming a veritable shelf of tangled locks above his ears, a mantelpiece of infrequently shampooed curls. He smiled at his mother, shrugging his shoulders. He seemed to be apologizing for his presence in the car.
“He wanted to come along,” said Gordon, opening the back door for Caitlin and smiling happily, as if the boy’s being there was some sort of triumph.
“And what are you supposed to do?” asked Caitlin. “Sit by yourself in the front like a chauffeur.” She cringed at her tone of voice. She sounded lonely, accusatory; she didn’t sound like a person she herself would much like to know.
“You know that’s not such a bad-paying job, these days,” said Gordon. He touched her elbow as she slid onto the back seat and then he closed the door with a flourish. Gordon’s judgment about the worthiness of a car was based in part on the sound of the back door’s closing, and he seemed satisfied with this one.
“How are you?” she asked Skip, as soon as she was in the car. He’d been working as a messenger for a small film-production company near the UN and living with a girl named Janet Gorman. But the relationship had ended—as far as Caitlin could make out, it had concluded abruptly—and then one night about a week ago he had called her in the middle of the night and wept copiously, unashamedly over the phone. Somewhere between sobs was a half-expressed notion that he wanted to kill himself. “I’m no one and everybody sees right through me,” he’d said. It had been enough to put Caitlin in a taxi at three in the morning and send her up the steep, fluorescent-struck stairs in his Turtle Bay tenement and stand pounding his steel-enforced door with her umbrella handle until he finally let her in.
“Merry Labor Day, Mom,” said the boy. He moved next to Caitlin and patted her hand.
“You know he had an invitation to spend the weekend with Janet’s family,” said Gordon. In his tone was an admonishment to Caitlin: he chose to be here.
“Oh, they hate my guts,” he said, quite airily. “Come on, now. And I mean it.” He made his voice hearty and sincere, the voice of the thickest camp counselor on the planet. “Let’s everybody get together, OK? And make this the best darn Labor Day we’ve ever had!”
He charmed her. She didn’t like to admit it; she didn’t quite believe in charm. She put charm in a category with hypnosis—something for which you needed a willing subject.
“Janet Gorman’s father is a career naval officer,” Gordon said, glancing up. Caitlin saw his sad, eager eyes in the rear-view mirror.
“And he’s never really appreciated me swabbing his daughter’s deck,” said the boy.
“He’d just like to see her on the arm of some seaman first class,” said Gordon.
“Rather than mixed up with my first-class semen.”
“Will you two stop it?” said Caitlin. “I mean, really. What do you spend your time doing? Working out comedy routines?” She looked at them both, hesitated. “I wasn’t aware you two spent so much time together.”
“We don’t, Mom. We’re psychic. It’s strictly neuronal.”
“Yeah,” said Gordon. “Neuronal.”
The piers along the West Side Highway, once the site of such passionate arrivals, were now for the most part empty, rotting away. Around Thirty-eighth Street a cruise ship under Greek registry was docked. Elderly people in straw hats and bright pastel clothing milled around. That was what was left.
“Do you smell a burning smell?” Gordon asked. He tapped his temperature gauge with his blunt index finger, as if trying to intimidate it into confessing some concealed truth about the engine’s heat.
Caitlin sniffed. “I don’t.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s probably coming over from Newark,” said Caitlin. Less than two months ago, a thousand people had been arrested, more than a thousand injured, and twenty-six killed when blacks in Newark took to the streets, fighting police, burning out the shopkeepers. In Harlem, the mayor of New York demonstrated his courage by simply walking down the street.
Gordon drove them north. Riverside Park was full of poor Harlem families with picnic baskets, radios. Caitlin looked at her son and thought about Janet Gorman. She knew it was not altogether wholesome to let fantasy or speculation intrude on your own son’s sexual privacy, but Caitlin could not help it and wondered if any mother could. The boy was so joky and evasive it was hard to imagine his face startled by passion. This boy whom she had borne and cuddled, a man now, with a hastily shaved face, a powerful jaw, unkempt fingernails, and massive, square knees poking through his frayed white bell-bottom trousers, was someone’s lover now.
“So I assume you and Janet have more or less patched things up,” said Caitlin.
“I don’t know. I don’t think you want to know about it.”
> “It’s up to you.”
“I’ve got sex problems, Mom.”
Caitlin was silent. She felt that far too much depended on what she said next.
“The whole concept of sex is a problem,” said Gordon. She saw his fervent eyes appear in the rear-view mirror. In some vague but instinctual way he was trying to rescue her. “Once we got beyond the simple idea of mating, procreation, survival of the species, it got all mixed up,” he was saying.
“You can talk to somebody about it, if you have problems,” Caitlin said. “It doesn’t have to be me. You can see someone, a counselor, a doctor, there’s nothing wrong in that, you know that, don’t you?”
“I can talk to you and Gordon about it,” he said. “I mean, if I can’t talk to you guys, who can I?”
“All I’m saying is you don’t have to.” Shut up and let him talk, for God’s sake, she thought.
“It’s just that I have this, you know, penis, and Janet thinks that’s what I’m about, you know, that that’s the main thing about me. It’s like a girl with big breasts, I guess. I don’t know.”
“People pay good money for this kind of problem, Skip,” said Gordon.
“Well, it’s just that … I don’t know. Screwing is not what I’m mainly into. I like to hold her and have her hold me, but that makes her angry. She says I’m incredibly selfish.”
Caitlin looked out the window. Gordon was really making time, weaving from lane to lane, passing cars on the right and the left: it was strange how these little pieces of male vanity persisted, like roots from old trees in a field improperly cleared.
“I don’t think I can be of any help in this, Skip,” Caitlin said. “It sounds more like Janet’s problem.”
“And, Mom?” he said. He took her hand again. His own hand was warm, soft. He gazed at her and she noted that despite everything he could disarm you with the trust in his eyes. Maybe that’s exactly what Janet and the considerable string of girls who had preceded her had found so attractive in him, before further considerations had interfered. What was he trying to tell her, she wondered. That he was incapable of love? Impotent? Scared to death?
“I don’t think I want you to call me Skip anymore, or Skippy. Especially not Skippy.”
“I never call you Skippy.”
“Gee, maybe I do sometimes,” said Gordon, with a you-know-me sort of wave.
“What do you want to be called?” asked Caitlin. “I mean, we’ve always called you Skip. On the posters for your play your name was Skip.”
“I’m too old for it now. Anyhow, my friends call me Monk.”
“Monk?” said Caitlin, her voice a blend of amusement and alarm.
“Not after Thelonius Monk or anything,” he was quick to say.
“I don’t know who Thelonius Monk is,” said Caitlin.
“It’s after Monk Eastman. One of the great Jewish gangsters from the old days on the Lower East Side. He was a real terror. He put so many people into the hospital that at Bellevue they called the emergency room the Monk Eastman Ward. We were reading about him in this incredible book by John Asbury called The Gangs of New York.”
At “Monk’s” urging, Gordon had the radio on. A group called the Byrds were singing lyrics made up of advice from the Old Testament. Their voices were sweet, harmonious, though static kept sweeping across the station like sudden tropical storms. Caitlin leaned back, closed her eyes. It was warm in the car; she felt a trickle of sweat begin in the hollow of her throat and roll down her chest, between her breasts. She had not been held, caressed, truly comforted in over a year. It no longer made her anxious so much as it embarrassed her, as if she had been excluded from some great universal ritual.
“I don’t like when the office is closed,” she announced.
“We know that,” said Gordon. “That’s why we’ve spirited you away. We’re operating on the theory that enough is enough.”
“It’s not as if I’m selling gumdrops up there, you know,” said Caitlin. “What I do is very important.”
“We know that, Mom. That’s not—”
“People all over the world are being destroyed. In one day, we were working on cases in Argentina, Vietnam, the Soviet Union. You weren’t alive, but you know that this country turned its back on the Jews and all kinds of other people in Europe when Hitler was murdering them. That’s a shame on us all. And we work damn hard to make certain it never happens again.”
Her voice was sharp, and she knew it was not how you spoke to people you loved. They were silent. She listened to the sound of the tires on the parkway: it sounded as if the tires needed air or the treads were somehow coming loose.
They were on their way to Leyden. The last time Caitlin had been up to see her old house was ten years before, again with Gordon and the boy. They had been taking Annie back for a look at her old house. The poor old woman had sat in the back seat, bundled up in two overcoats and a woolen scarf, moving her mouth up and down, and staring silently out the window—she had given absolutely no indication that she recognized anything or that the entire ordeal held the slightest meaning to her. Yet when they finally arrived on the estate— empty that autumn and the lawns thick with crimson maple leaves—Annie had been agitated and refused to get out of the car. It was not until they were halfway back to the Woodlawn Convalescent Home, where Annie would die six days later, that she finally said her one sentence of the day: “They treated me badly.” And then she nodded to herself, stopped moving her mouth, as if she had finally chewed what needed to be chewed, and that was that.
As they reached Leyden, Caitlin began pointing out the landmarks, both public and personal, to her son. “That’s where the Cohen brothers had their fruit stand,” she said, indicating where there was now a small playground, with a slide, a monkey puzzler, and a teeter-totter. “During the Depression, when the price of apples went way down, someone set it on fire. It was the most beautiful stand, all slatted wood and carvings of different fruits. Travelers used to stop there. But people blamed the Cohens because farmers weren’t making money on their crops. And over there, across the stream, that small blue-and-yellow house, that used to be where my father’s friend Junior Winters lived. Winters had a small orchard outside of town, and there were some people who thought it was either Junior or his brother Wade who set the fire.” She glanced at her son, primarily to make certain he was paying attention. She remembered what it was like to be twenty, how the stories of old people seemed so irrelevant. She remembered how her own mind would glaze over with inattention when Joe’s sister Hilda would talk about the wine-importing business, or her memories of Austria, or even of her fears for her family left back in Vienna.
He was paying attention. He was listening to every word, as if collecting clues for a hunt he would undertake at some future time. He was staring into her eyes; he was memorizing not only every word, but each gesture, the fall of her brown hair, the sheen of her light red lipstick, the arc of her eyebrows, the enduring nobility of her bones, the smell of her cologne, the whisper of cotton as she shifted in her seat, moved and a little embarrassed by the avidity of his concentration.
“I’m really glad I came for this,” he said. “You never tell me anything about yourself, your life, or anything.”
“That’s not true,” said Caitlin, too quickly.
“I sometimes think that’s why I, I don’t know, have my problems. I sure don’t know my father and you’re kind of hidden, too. I’ve had to make myself up, is what I think. Nothing gets passed along, and it’s like having to reinvent the wheel. It’s been all this unnecessary work and I don’t think it’s fair.”
“There’s a time in everyone’s life,” Caitlin said, her voice cooling, “when he thinks that what he must know is the truth about his parents. But that time will pass.”
“I really want to know,” he said.
“Well, if you look out the window right here you’ll see Pell’s Pond. That’s where poor Michael Burnett fell through the ice and drowned, when we were in high sc
hool. He was a tall, graceful boy, vain about his hair, without much on his mind. I could never tell why, but it was widely assumed we were sweethearts—”
“Sweethearts,” said Gordon. “Now there’s a lovely word from the past.”
“I never felt I really knew him,” said Caitlin. “I went to the funeral. The whole school did. And all the girls in the class, you know the girls who embodied the spirit of the place, the morality, the social cliques and arrangements—it was all very tribal, when I think back on it—they all approached me after the burial. And they made this terrible ceremony, giving me poor Michael Burnett’s school sweater, his football, and his school notebook. My name was written on it. But not by Michael, you understand. One of those girls did it. Not to fool anyone, but because they decided it was what Michael would have wanted, what he would have done himself if I’d only been more encouraging.”
“I’ll bet he loved you,” said Gordon.
“Then you’d lose the bet. What they really wanted was someone to play that role, the part of the grieving girlfriend. They insisted on it and I was too … I don’t know what I was, but I didn’t resist. I stood there at his graveside, clutching his gray-and-gold sweater. Weeping. Weeping. Just absolutely weeping.”
Caitlin paused for a moment. Gordon had stopped at the town’s light. To the left was the George Washington Inn, newly painted white, with middle-sized poplars on the front lawn where the gigantic elms had once grown. To the right Central Smoking Supply had a window display of curved English pipes and checked woolen Sherlock Holmes caps.
“We’re early for our succulent country dinner,” said Gordon. He had reserved a table for them for two o’clock, certain that Caitlin would feel some sort of triumph being served in the place where she once had worked. He had planned their arrival in Leyden so they would have time to look around the town before they ate.
Secret Anniversaries Page 19