“I don’t know what good it will do,” I said, “but I will tell him what you’ve told me. I will.” And then I did hug him. I felt a kind of weakness in his body, frailness so much different than Truman’s or Tommy’s body, but I felt, then, a real tenderness toward him. He loved Truman and I did, too. I guess I loved him at that moment for loving Truman. I guess I did.
Amy
Fifteen days after Truman’s death
I used to imagine the future for Truman. I used to sit on the carpeted floor with my son, his blond hair still in curl, his brown eyes beginning to take on that intensity that would lend them to black and searing and profound, and I would think of what he would become when he was a young man. I knew it would be remarkable. That I knew. At three he was already plunking on the piano Ethan had bought for him and for me. I’d play those familiar chords I’d learned to play from my piano instructor, Mr. Gibbons.
I used to love sitting beside the man on the seat, his smell of aftershave and some hair tonic, the rise of pink in his cheeks as he listened patiently to my progress-less attempts at the simplest pinching out of tunes. My hands were always shaking at the keys with the consuming desire I had that he would place one of his beautiful hands on my thigh and turn to me and plant a kiss on my lips. He was so handsome, and serious, and reluctant to admonish even though I never had any facility for music or the piano and I never practiced from one session to the next. I would only ever be thinking about him beside me, finally turning to me.
And so Ethan had bought a Steinway for us, never listening to what I really said, wondering why I very seldom raised the lid of the piano and played the music he’d expected to hear. He’d surprised me one day by leading me into the living room and announcing, “This is for you, Amy. For you and Truman so you can play. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, why I didn’t buy you one years ago. But now you can have the time to practice whenever you like, and you, or someone else, when Truman finally pops out, can teach him to play as beautifully as you do.”
Because Ethan only heard what he wanted to hear instead of the fact that I’d only taken the lessons because of Mr. Gibbons—Patrick, I’d learned later on. I didn’t stop until my desire for the instructor was overridden by my embarrassment at his growing frustration as I persisted in showing absolutely no improvement. I was almost relieved when he finally suggested that a few years away from the piano might heighten my longing to advance.
Longing was the word he used, which made me love him even more, because I’d always fallen in love with boys, men, who had passion—and Ethan had passion, too, in his own ineffable way—and so to him my inability to get better was only a matter of marshaling the adequate amount of passion. Then I would at least become proficient, even if mastery wasn’t a prospect for my musical future. And unlike me I knew Truman could have become an accomplished pianist, but I also could see almost immediately that practice was not part of him; if he didn’t get something immediately, he quickly lost interest in it. And I would hear the plink of keys and there would be some string of coherence to the sound, but it was all Truman’s and he never once was interested in the sheet music he was supposed to learn.
I would watch him on that bench and think to myself, What is my boy going to do when he becomes an adult? Doctor, lawyer, architect, diplomat, professor? But none of those seemed to fit Truman as I watched him, his blond hair and brown eyes looking out at the world with complete wonder, his dimpled elbows and lovely, chubby neck, his shoulders already like Ethan’s, his beautiful long hands and fingers gliding across the piano, his feet not able to reach the floor or the pedals.
I could have watched him for hours if he’d stayed positioned on that black bench, the sheet music in front of him, but, in Truman style, he never even looked at the sheet. He just kept pounding away on the keys as if they were the very sound that would define his future. Truman. Truman. Truman. Truman. With all your talent and brilliance, I knew you would shake the world, whatever it was you did.
At first he wanted to be an interior designer, rearranging his room weekly, wanting a couch, vases with flowers, printed wallpaper, always rearranging, almost every week, so that I would finally just give in and roll up my sleeves to help. The couch here, the bed there, the bureaus along that wall, the trim on the windows and doors salmon, green, blue, white, beige. Ethan would lean against the jamb of the door with a martini or glass of wine in his hand at the end of the day and smile, luxuriate in our industry, Truman pointing and rearranging and coaxing and demanding.
Then a landscape designer, having the patience to wait for Ethan and the weekend before box hedges were planted, patios redesigned, trellises erected, painted, rosebushes planted, flower beds moved or established, Ethan smiling the whole time because it was Truman, anything for Truman, our Truman.
He hated school. He couldn’t stand being teased for his uniqueness, his demanding character, his Truman-ness. One aggressive older boy teased him on the bus daily, so one evening Ethan took Truman down into the basement and taught him how to box.
“What are you doing, Ethan? I don’t want him to be a bully,” I said.
“He won’t be. I don’t want him being bullied. There’s only one way to treat a bully. They’re cowards. They only need to be reminded of that fact.”
Truman hit the boy the next day, splitting his lip, and, just as Ethan predicted, the boy never bothered him again. But Truman didn’t capitalize on that. He didn’t go around with this newfound power and abuse it. He was sick for a week thinking about the split lip, the frightened look on the boy’s face.
“He would’ve never stopped, Truman,” Ethan reasoned. “You’re the one who came home crying and tormented every day.”
But it was like Ethan had unearthed a part of human beings Truman hadn’t known about, and was ill equipped to deal with. The world out there was not like our home, where brilliance and kindness and family were enough. The world beyond our doors was full of people from all walks of life, some of whom didn’t give a whit about life’s panoramic possibilities, and would never accept people in possession of talent ranging beyond the sheet music in front of them.
And that’s why Carly was so important to Truman. She was in love with him, I knew, from the moment they began to play together, their heads huddled together on the floor of one room or another, sharing the secrets children share away from adults, the secrets that help, eventually, to make them adults themselves. Carly made Truman happy, happier than he’d ever been before. It was the human contact, perhaps, with someone other than his two parents, who’d held him and kissed him and watched him as if he were a museum piece of such rare quality he couldn’t go unnoticed for a second.
And people, of course, would suggest that all that pampering had made him “queer.” I’m sure they whispered that behind our backs. But then there was Carly who adored him also, wanted nothing more than to be with him every day, and no, not like brother and sister, but like young lovers, the fledgling stages of a love affair. Finally, after their early years, finally leading to the room over the garage where they began to learn about each other. I never told Ethan. I knew Truman and Carly would want it to be their secret. They had a right to create their own world and I don’t think I ever knew Truman happier after he was no longer a baby, no longer just with Ethan and me but with Carly, too.
But when he began school, with all the boys who wanted to tease and push and pinch and punch, he immediately drew the contrast. He came into the kitchen one day when he was nine and said:
“I want to marry Carly, Mom.”
“You’re a little too young,” I said distractedly. I was preparing dinner or cleaning dishes. I don’t remember now.
“I know,” he said, the severity in his voice cautioning me I wasn’t to take what he said lightly. “I’m not talking about now.”
I turned and looked at him and I suddenly knew he’d been thinking about it for a long time. I wanted to be careful. I wanted to take it seriously, and I know that so
unds so ridiculous, a nine-year-old boy making a statement like that. But even then I was walking a tightrope of caution with Truman. I knew he was different, never wanting to play with trucks or throw the baseball with Ethan (yes, he would be out there and I would watch from the sunroom, but I could tell even then that Truman was not really interested in baseball, only in why his father thought it was important) or play with other boys. I would invite other boys over to play with Truman, but it never was successful, really. Yes, he had sleepovers, and roller-skating birthday parties, and the like, but somehow every kid went home disappointed, their parents’ faces full of disapproval and some knowledge Ethan and I didn’t have and couldn’t see because we were so madly in love with our son.
But what was it that we couldn’t see? What child knows at seventeen if he is gay or not gay? And especially a child as complex as my Truman, telling me at nine he wanted to get married to Carly. Not like most kids at nine, who say that and the next week are on to loving the pet dog or cat or wanting an Etch A Sketch or whatever those things were when Truman was that age—or was it my age when that was popular?—but I don’t really know because Truman was never interested in toys, never pulled at my skirt when we were out shopping saying, like other kids, “Mommy I want that.”
And it wasn’t long after Truman told me he wanted to marry Carly that he stopped calling me “Mommy.” It just ended. I became “Mom.” Ethan was still called “Daddy” sometimes. But if Truman was serious, it was “Dad.” I felt as if something had been taken from me when he no longer called me “Mommy.”
“Marriage is a long way away, Tru,” I said. He was standing looking at me with his plaid shirt and brown corduroy pants and his one hand resting on the back of a chair, his hair only neatly in place because it was kept short—he hated taking the time to comb his hair back then, though later it would be a priority.
“Of course I know I can’t marry her now. Where would we live? Not here, I can promise you.”
At nine years old. And what had he meant by that? Not here, I can promise you. I laughed at the time, couldn’t wait for Ethan to get home so I could pour him a glass of wine and we could smile over such a precocious thing to say at that age. Our Truman. It wasn’t until later that I saw there was more to it than that. It was like the rock you see in the yard and you decide to dig it out, smoothed by ages of wear, and you keep digging and realize it’s huge and must have been pushed there during an ice age and it wasn’t going to come out just like that. And you couldn’t tell when you only saw the edge of it. You didn’t realize until you started unearthing it.
And that was the way it was with Truman saying, “Not here, I can promise you,” because already he was beginning to turn in on himself and shut me and the rest of the world—including Carly—out. It was slight, of course, nothing I could have seen. But I kept envisioning things for Truman: doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, architect, teacher, landscape designer, interior designer. It wasn’t as if I didn’t still think one of those things would happen when he was older. At one point I even thought he would become a senator, Senator Engroff, but it was just that it was no longer in our hands at all. It was, like all things pertaining to Truman, his alone. Truman in his room thinking whatever it was he was always thinking and never letting us know.
Just as it was that last night. Ethan and I were in the kitchen drinking wine, thinking about making love later, and Truman came in smelling of a fresh shower, his hair combed back, still wet so the blond was darker. He came in and neither of us—I won’t accuse Ethan alone of this—neither of us asked where he was going. We’d become accustomed to not asking, but to relying on his magnanimity—that’s how we’d begun to feel—to share what was going on in his life. Or sometimes we’d ask but we had to wait for the right time, like when I was a teenager waiting for the right time to ask my parents to borrow the car or stay over at a friend’s house. I’d watch for when both my parents were jolly with drinks before dinner, or listening to music or reading books and didn’t want to be bothered with wrangling over the wheres or whens, and it was like that with Truman, gauging when he did and did not want to share even a miniscule part of his world.
If it were the right time, he would become garrulous, even rambling, and I would bask in those times. It was like the moment a headache subsides and one’s normal, pain-free existence resumes. And we didn’t go around on our tiptoes as some parents do. I didn’t want any of these pedestrian-thinking people who might get a trickle of information about my Truman determining he was obstreperous, or that we were frightened of him. It was not like that. Truman was private. We lived in a house where privacy was respected. We all knew when and when not to ask particular questions about one another’s lives. Truman learned it from us, of course, but he became more that way than us. He was mostly private, he mostly wanted to be left alone with his own thoughts, mostly unable or reluctant to share.
One year Ethan got it in his head to take me to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.
“It’s the Grand Canyon of the East Coast, Amy. We have to go see it, the Pine Creek Gorge. No one should miss out on this.”
Ethan would get these ideas, and act on them, and I must admit it was thrilling. One year he took me to Nova Scotia. We’d already been to Paris, London, Prague, Rome—all the predictable places—and Ethan thought we should fly to Halifax for a week. It was funny because that time the one-star general watched Truman. Truman must’ve been five, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick him with his great-grandfather for six days, but the one-star’s second wife, Hannah, was still alive at the time, and she was sweet and smart, and she loved Truman, sending him exotic gifts at Christmas from places all over the world, with handwritten and hand-drawn cards (those cards must be in Truman’s room somewhere).
But this time, the time we went to the Grand Canyon in Pennsylvania, we were taking Truman. Bringing him was my idea, even though he was fifteen and could have stayed home alone with the Rodenbaughs just down the road. I wasn’t exactly worried about him drinking—Truman could drink anytime he wanted with us, and he wasn’t particularly interested—but he’d been hanging around with boys a little older than he—Logan Marsh for instance—and I was worried he’d let them congregate at our house. Thinking back on that decision I feel bad, because Truman was devastated by our insistence that he go.
“I’m fifteen, for Christ’s sake. I can take care of myself!”
“It’s not you I’m worried about, Truman. It’s other people.”
“Who’s ‘other people?’ Logan? He’s older than I am. He’s not interested in partying or having parties. He’s going to Columbia next year, for God’s sake.”
But the truth was I thought Logan was gay and I was worried about him and Truman sleeping together. I wanted Truman to experience sex with someone…yes, of course the ideal person would’ve been Carly, probably had been Carly, but anyone his age if it were going to be a boy, and sometime down the road. No. I was not in denial of Truman being gay. I just wanted him to make certain. I wanted him not to regret his actions. I don’t know if Ethan agreed. I think he wanted Truman to stay home so we could hike alone, stay in a room alone, eat at restaurants and drink whiskey in the afternoon alone. But he didn’t say anything. Truman was in the back of the SUV, headphones on all the way to Wellsboro. The country going there on Route 80 was subtly splendid, like most of the Northeast.
It was early spring and there was snow still lingering once we got to the Pocono Mountains. And the weekend was beautiful. Sunny every day, with the wonderful breeze of early spring pushing through the bare branches, the fat buds on the tips only a few warm days away from opening into a greenness of maturity. I watched Truman and Ethan as they walked ahead of me on the trails, and I wondered if they were conspiring, speaking about my distrust of Truman alone in our house for four days, and I wanted to shout down to them, “He’s only fifteen! We could be reported by some concerned neighbor.”
But that wasn’t why I didn’t want him there alone. I didn’t want hi
m to not want Carly. There. I said it. Or some other beautiful girl so Ethan and I could have a grandchild when we were older and Truman would be compelled to come visit us. I was afraid that, when he went off to college, graduated from college, he would be gone from us for good. I mean, we would see him, of course, but he certainly wouldn’t want to come back to Persia, and I couldn’t blame him. He hated living here, hated these people with their narrow views of the world.
“It’d be different if they weren’t educated. If they were like those families that still have farms and are isolated by their own lives and work.”
These were the moments when I wanted to put my arms around my only son and hold him close to me so I could be reminded that he’d once been part of me.
Those days were really the last days we ever had with Truman alone. And they were tainted by the fact that Truman was reluctant to go, listened to his headphones the entire trip there, never once raising his head so he could see the magnificence of the mountains, the rolling hills of moribund farms with cattle and patches of snow scattered on the hillside. It seemed to me, too, that Ethan was oblivious, as so often he was, of Truman’s actions. That is, until they huddled together on the paths leading down to Pine Creek and I was left to wonder if they were talking about me, about my intractability. I knew Truman; I knew he was relentless when he had an issue, and he could usually sway Ethan. They didn’t know how alike they were and I had to laugh when I saw their two heads together, the two Engroff heads, conspiring.
I paid little attention, though. Ethan was right. It was breathtaking. Who would’ve ever thought that Pennsylvania had such beautiful country to offer? We’d never been to the “real” Grand Canyon. Ethan had wanted to go, but I wasn’t interested in different colors of rock. I loved trees. I loved green and fecund lushness. Ethan, I told him more than once, could go on his own. I wouldn’t object.
Beneath the Weight of Sadness Page 19