by T. C. Boyle
But on that June day in the garden with the flowers in riot and the air so soft and sustaining it was like a scented bath, with the faerie house looming behind us and the dense drugged stillness of the morning insulating us from the world, Mac reached out her hand to me and I took it. She didn’t say a word. Just tugged gently till she conveyed what she wanted and I came up out of the dirt and let her lead me to a place at the back of the yard where the trees closed us in. There was a blanket there, spread out on the grass, and the sight of it made me surge with excitement: she’d planned out everything in advance, thought of me, wanted me, and here was the proof of it.
“Here,” she said, “sit,” and I obeyed her, my breath coming shallow and quick as she stood above me and unbuttoned her blouse, stepped out of her shorts, and with a slow graceful dip of her body, knelt down beside me and let her hands flow over my chest and abdomen, all the while exerting the gentlest soothing pressure on the strung-tight cords of my shoulders and upper arms, until finally I was resting on my elbows, then my back, and I could feel her fingers at the sash of the loincloth. The moment seemed to last forever, then the cloth slipped free and I felt her take hold of me in the one place that mattered. I knew what I was doing. I’d seen the slides, transcribed the histories. And I’d taken Professor Keating’s classics course and I knew Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus and I knew that Prok was the old king and I was the son and Mac the mother. My eyes were open. I was no victim. And this was sex—not love, but sex—and I came to it as if I’d been doing it all my life.
5
I graduated the following Saturday.
My mother—and more on her in a moment—drove all the way down from Michigan City with Tommy McAuliffe and my Aunt Marjorie in Tommy’s Dodge (we’d never had a car; it was a luxury, according to my mother, that we just couldn’t afford, hence I’d never learned to drive, not till Prok took it upon himself to teach me later that summer). This was in June of 1940, and events in Europe—the evacuation at Dunkirk and the imminent fall of France—overshadowed what must have been one of the glummest graduation celebrations in IU history. Everybody was unsettled, and not just the seniors going out into the world. Conscription was a virtual certainty now. All the undergraduate men would be affected.
But I was graduating—magna cum laude, no less—and my mother was going to make an occasion of it, Hitler or no Hitler. She’d booked rooms for herself and my aunt a full year in advance so as to outmaneuver the other parents, the ones who might not be quite so astute or forward-looking, and Tommy was going to sleep on a cot in the room I shared with Paul Sehorn, everything arranged on the up-and-up with Mrs. Lorber beforehand. Now, as to my mother. I feel I should give her her due here, though one could argue that her role is hardly central to Prok’s story, and yet I find it difficult to talk about her (she’s alive and well, as of this testimonial, still teaching elementary school in Michigan City and not yet sixty). Hers was—is—a character formed by circumstance, and by circumstance, I mean, specifically, having to raise a son on her own during the Depression, widowed at thirty and with her parents nearly a thousand miles away and unable (and unwilling) to help. She was frugal, precise, as efficient and predictable as a machine, and nothing anyone had ever done or could ever do was quite up to her standard. But that sounds harsh and I don’t mean to be harsh—she gave me clothing, food, opportunity, and if her emotional self went into retreat after my father disappeared, then certainly I’m not in any position to blame her. Nor is anyone else for that matter. She absorbed her sorrow, drank it up like a sponge, and then hardened with it till she calcified. But that’s not right either. She’s my mother and I love her unconditionally, in the way any son loves his mother. That goes without saying. Perhaps a physical description, perhaps I’d better stick to that.
My mother was taller than average—five foot seven—and she played intramural basketball when she was in high school, loved swimming and hiking and gossip. She was of Dutch descent—her maiden name was van der Post—and she had a natural wave to her hair, which was an amalgam of red and brown that in summer went to gold on the ends. She had a dramatic figure (I’m aware of this, in retrospect, not so much from observation—you just don’t think of your mother in that way—but because she was proud of it, forever dispensing the information that so-and-so had complimented her legs or made some reference to the way her sweaters fit her like a model’s and how she ought to have a screen test in Hollywood), but if she had any sexual outlets after my father’s death, she was careful to conceal them from me, and I wouldn’t mention the subject here at all but for what transpired between her and Prok. And for the sake of inclusivity, of course.
In any case, I was watching at the window that Friday afternoon when Tommy’s Dodge pulled up to the curb in a flash of reflected sunlight and my mother and Aunt Marjorie got out, looked round them as if they’d been delivered to the Amazon instead of Bloomington, Indiana, and adjusted their hats a moment before mounting the front steps of the rooming house. I could have met them at the door, but I held back a moment, and I don’t really know why. This was a time of celebration, of joy—for once I had the prospect of being spoiled a bit; there would be a nice dinner certainly, oysters, celery sticks with blue-cheese filling, steak served up medium rare on unchipped plates against a field of linen so white it could have been manufactured that very morning—but I just stood there at the window and never made a move to go downstairs till I heard her voice in the hallway. I don’t know what she was saying—greeting Mrs. Lorber no doubt, making some sort of animadversion on the state of the roads or Tommy’s driving, or the weather: Wasn’t it hot?—but the tone of it took hold of me and I went downstairs to her cold embrace, the dutiful son, John, her boy John.
The three women stood there in the vestibule, turned slightly toward the staircase, as if posing for a group portrait, which I suppose you might call Awaiting His Footsteps in a Time of Quiet Jubilation or Who Will Save the Day? “Mother,” I said, taking the steps one at a time, slowly, with dignity, no bounding or undergraduate hijinks here, “welcome. And Aunt Marjorie—thanks so much. And Mrs. Lorber—have you met Mrs. Lorber?”
My mother embraced me in her stiff, formal way, but her eyes told me she was proud of me and pleased too. She was about to say something to that effect—or at least I assumed she was—when Tommy came rocketing up the steps from the street and burst through the door to wrap me up in a bear hug. “Hello, professor!” he shouted, spinning me around like some oversized package he was about to raffle off. “You know it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!” Everyone smiled as if he’d lost his mind. Which he had. A moment later, when we were alone up in the room, he showed me the agency of his temporary derangement: a flask of whiskey convenient to the inside pocket of a sports coat. He handed it to me and I automatically took a long burning swallow, and when I tried to pass it back to him, he wouldn’t take it. “Look at the initials on it,” he said, sinking into Paul’s bed as if his legs would no longer hold him.
Reproduced there, in filigree, were the initials JAM, for John Anthony Milk. “These are my initials,” I said stupidly.
Tommy regarded me out of eyes that ran down the depths of two long tunnels. He’d listened to my mother and aunt for hours on end and who could blame him for being on the far side of sober? “You bet,” he said.
There were five of us at dinner that night—my mother, my aunt, Tommy, Iris and myself. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a downtown hotel (not the one where my aunt and mother were staying, which was much more modest), and it had the reputation of being Bloomington’s best, at least in that sleepy, provincial era before the war. There were potted palms to shield the tables from one another, the maitre d’ was decked out in his best approximation of a tuxedo and had managed to paste his hair so tightly to his scalp it was like a black bathing cap with a part drawn down the side of it, and the menu ran from onion soup au gratin to grilled veal chops, whitefish and, of course, beef in all its incarnations.
We all started out with shrimp cocktails, the shrimp perched prettily up off individual goblets of ice, and Tommy and I ordered beers while the ladies had a round of gin fizzes. I was feeling elated. Not only was I the center of attention—this was a fete for me, and because I was an adult now, a college graduate who’d achieved something in his own right, it had none of the constraint of the regimented birthday parties my mother used to arrange right up until the time I left high school for the university—but there was the flask to consider too. Its contents had gone a long way toward fueling my enthusiasm. Was I tipsy? I don’t know. But I saw things with a kind of blinding clarity, as if the world had suddenly been illuminated, as if I’d been living in two dimensions all my life, in a black-and-white picture, and now there were three and everything came in Technicolor. Iris, for instance.
She sat across the table from me, her shoulders bared in a strapless organdy gown—blue, a soft cool pastel blue, with a tiny matching hat pinned atop the sweeping shadow of her hair—and I saw that she’d plucked her eyebrows and redrawn them in two perfect black arches that led the way to her eyes. To this point we hadn’t said much to each other, she absorbed with my mother and aunt, Tommy and I reliving old times with a series of sniggers and arm cuffs and all the rest of the adolescent apparatus that still imprisoned us in boyhood though we would have been mortified if anyone had taken us for anything less than men. My mother said, “We have to intervene. There’s no choice to it now. God forbid my son should have to go—I don’t have to tell you he’s the only thing I have left in this world—but we can’t afford to divorce ourselves from the rest of humanity, we just can’t, not anymore.”
“That’s what they want you to believe,” Iris said, setting down her fork. She’d ordered the fish, and the white flakes of it gleamed on the tines against an amber puddle of sauce on her plate. “Why should we get drawn in? Forgive me—I know Holland’s been occupied—but it’s happened before, hasn’t it? War after war?”
Tommy was in the middle of a reminiscence about a prank he’d pulled off after a football game against our biggest rival, and he was mistaken in thinking that I’d been part of it, but he was so wrapped up in the memory that I didn’t want to disabuse him. But now he looked at his sister as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Oh, come on, sis, are you kidding me? France’ll be gone in a week, two at the most, and then Hitler can pound England till there’s nothing left but rubble, and you really think he’ll be satisfied with that? You think he’ll send a box of chocolates to Roosevelt and kiss and make up?”
“Exactly,” my mother said, and her chin was set. “It might take him years to get here—a decade even, who knows? But the world is smaller than you might think, Iris, and nobody is safe as long as that madman is in it. Did you see him in the newsreel last week? The goose-step. Aren’t you sick to death of the goose-step?”
“You don’t understand. It’s not our war,” Iris said. “It has nothing to do with us. Why should our boys die for some crumbling empire, for, for—John,” she said, turning to me, “what do you think?”
What I thought was that the celebration had gone sour. What I thought was that Iris looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen in my life, her eyes lit with indignation, her mouth puckered, the whitefish at her command. I tried on a grin. “I don’t know,” I murmured, “but personally? I don’t want to die.”
I was trying for levity, trying to take us all someplace else and expunge the strutting dictator from my celebratory dinner, but no one laughed. They just looked at me—even Aunt Marjorie, the mildest person I’ve ever known—as if I’d admitted to fraud or child rape or murder. War. We were in the grip of war, and there was no shaking it off.
It was Iris who came to my rescue. She’d taken a moment to slip the fork between her lips and masticate her fish and a sliver of green bean. “That’s my point,” she said, still chewing. “I don’t want to die either. Nobody does.”
My mother waved a hand in dismissal. “You’re too young yet. You don’t understand. There’s a larger picture here, and a larger issue—”
“Hey,” Tommy said, as if he were awakening from a nap, “anybody want another beer—or cocktail?”
We walked my mother and Aunt Marjorie back to their hotel, then went out for a nightcap, just the three of us, and finally took Iris back to the dorm just before curfew. A dozen couples were sitting around the lounge gazing into each other’s eyes. One of the girls had a conspicuous grass stain on her skirt—a stripe of vivid green against a beige that was almost white—and a guy I vaguely recognized was on the sofa with his girl, leaning in so close he looked as if he’d been glued to her. Her feet were on the floor, though—that was the rule—and so were his. The RA—the same blonde with the limp hair—had her head buried in a book.
Tommy had slowed down considerably as the evening wore on, and now, as we crossed the lounge to a semi-private spot against the far wall, behind the RA’s desk, he wasn’t so much walking as lurching. Iris’s arm was linked in mine. We stood there bunched against the wall a moment, while Tommy struggled to light a cigarette—he dropped the cigarette twice to the carpet, then dropped the matches. “Listen,” he said, straightening up and squinting round the room as if he’d never seen men and women necking before, “I’ve got to—it’s hot in here, isn’t it? Listen, I’ve got to go find a lavatory somewhere, all right?”
We watched him pull one foot and then the other up off the carpet, moving as if the solid floor had suddenly been converted to a trampoline, and then he was out the door, a smell of the scented night air trailing behind him. “Good old Tommy,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. “He must be a swell brother. You’re really lucky, you know that?”
Iris was drawn into herself, leaning back against the wall, her shoulders narrowed as if she were cold. She was watching me closely. Her arms—lovely arms, beautiful arms, the shapeliest, most perfectly formed arms I’d ever seen—were folded across her breasts, but she dropped them now to her sides, as if she were opening herself up to me. We had kissed here before, in this very spot, just out of sight of the RA, but the kisses had been constrained and proper, or as proper as they could be given the fact that we were pressed up against the wall in a place where the lamplight was dimmest and our tongues had just begun to discover a new function altogether. She didn’t believe in petting or premarital sex of any kind, raised a Catholic and haunted by it, diminished by what had been imposed on her and helpless to escape it. “You don’t mind, do you?” she’d whispered one night, her breath hot on my face, the taste of her on my lips. “No,” I’d said, “no, I don’t mind.”
But now—tonight, on my big night, the night before the graduation ceremony and all the uncertainty it implied—she took hold of me and pressed her body to mine so that I could feel her breasts go soft against my chest. Her voice was so low it was barely audible. “Kiss me,” she whispered.
The ceremony went off as planned, the speeches sufficiently inspiring, the weather cooperating, President Wells exercising his handshake and handing over the diplomas one after another as a gentle breeze came down out of Illinois to animate our robes and tug ever so gently at the girls’ hairdos. Afterward, there was a private reception at Prok’s—he’d insisted, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, it was the least he could do for a young man who’d done so much for him—and we got to glory among the flowers and sample Mac’s punch and Prok’s liqueurs. My mother didn’t really hit it off with Mac, which wasn’t unusual for her—she’d always worn her reserve like a suit of armor and had never really warmed to people, not till she’d mixed with them four or five times, and even then there was no guarantee—but there was something deeper and more complex involved here, and I’d probably cite Freud at this juncture but for the fact that Prok so rigorously educated me against him.
Prok, though, was a different story—she seemed to take to him right away. Of course, he went out of his way to make my mother feel comfortable, zeroing right in on her and giving
her an extended tour of the garden, all the while soliciting her opinion on the dahlias or the heliotropes—or the azaleas that just seemed to thrive in the most acidic conditions he could provide, and had she tried coffee grounds? Coffee grounds were one of the most convenient and effective ways of changing the pH factor of the soil, at least as far as Prok had been able to discover. Of course you had to be mindful of chlorosis, but that could be cured by the addition of iron chelate to the soil, well worked in, needless to say …
I watched them draw slowly away from the main body of the party, my mother balancing a tiny liqueur glass in one gloved hand, the sun glancing off the crown of her hat and making a glowing transparency of the single long trailing feather, Prok nodding and gesticulating as he guided her down the path. He was dressed formally, in what we (that is, Corcoran, Rutledge and I) came to regard as his uniform: dark suit, white shirt, crisply knotted bow tie in a two-color geometric pattern. I could see that he was a bit on edge because of having to give up a day’s work, first for the academic convocation at the graduation ceremony and now for this little gathering, but to the uneducated eye he seemed as relaxed and charming as an antebellum plantation owner showing off his holdings. The children were playing an extended game of croquet, while Iris, Tommy and I sat under a tree with my Aunt Marjorie and Mac, who’d kicked off her shoes and was forever dashing back and forth from the house with a tray of canapés or the persimmon tarts she’d baked herself that morning in my honor.