“And I hate seeing you with a gun.”
Gus nodded patiently. It was a catechism he knew by heart.
“I want to carry a lace hankie,” he said, “but they won’t let me.”
“It was guns killed your poor father.”
Whenever she said this, Gus always knew better. The gun might have been the instrument, but it wasn’t the cause. But he never commented.
Mellen stared out the window.
“You going to make us something for supper?” she said.
“I’ll make you something,” Gus said. “I’m going out.”
“Again?”
“Ma, I went out two Fridays ago.”
“Where are you going?”
“Gonna have dinner with friends at the Bavarian Rathskellar.”
“What friends?”
“Guy I know, Butchie O’Brien, owns a tavern in Charlestown. Him and his wife.”
“And you?”
“Me and a friend of Butchie’s wife.”
“Is she your date?”
“Yeah, I guess so, blind date.”
Mellen was silent for a while, looking out the window.
“There’s a ham in the icebox,” Gus said. “You want some ham and potato salad, maybe?”
“Be careful, Gus,” Mellen said. “You’re a young man, and these women are a great temptation.”
“I haven’t even met this one, Ma. She’s a blind date.”
“I know women, Gus. I know them as a woman and as a mother. And I know you, as only a mother can, as someone who carried you in her womb. Single young men are vulnerable to sex. It seems so desirable.”
Gus finished his beer. He knew this catechism as well. And he knew there was no way to divert it.
“But no matter how desirable sex seems, if you give in to it you will regret it.”
Gus stood. He wanted another beer.
“If there is temptation,” Mellen said, “think of the Blessed Virgin. Think of me. Stay pure for me, Gus. Save yourself for marriage. Make me proud.”
“Sure, Ma. You want some tea with your supper?”
Gus
Dancing with Peggy Sheehan was more fun than Gus could remember having. She would lean a little back in his arm, so that she could look up at him—the posture would make her thighs press against his—and she would talk. Gus was always quiet and he always felt too quiet when he was with a woman. Peggy didn’t seem to mind. In fact she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were bright and her face was animated, and she would talk about what happened at Jordan Marsh, where she was a stenographer in the credit department, and what happened at home in Lynn with her sisters, and the fun she’d had last year when they all went up to Salem Willows. She used a bright lipstick, Gus noticed, and she enjoyed a drink. The smell of her—perfume, cigarette smoke, liquor—seemed to promise enchantment. And her laughter seemed perpetual and enduring, sounding in Gus’s imagination long after they’d said good-night.
They began to kiss good-night on the second date, and by the fourth time he was able to put his hand on her breast, outside her sweater, and that was as far as it went.
“None of that,” she would say if Gus tried for more. “Only my husband will get to do any of that, Mister Pushy Pushy.”
“I’m sorry,” Gus would say, his voice raspy with desire.
And Peggy would say, “Oh, I know, Gussy, men always try. They can’t help it.”
And Gus would be grateful that she wasn’t angry.
“My mother’s always warning me about you sex crazed women,” Gus said once, as they sat in the Eliot Lounge after work. Peggy was drinking her third Cuba Libre.
“Oh, phooey on your mother,” Peggy said. “Your mother this, your mother that …” She drank. “Hell with your mother.”
And she laughed. And he laughed.
“Hell with her,” Gus said.
1956
Gus
She undressed in the bathroom, and insisted that the lights be off before she came out. Gus was in bed under the covers, when she came to the bed wearing a long nightie with small bows at the neckline. She got into bed beside him and pulled the covers up, and closed her eyes.
“Don’t you hurt me,” Peggy said. “I’m not very big.”
She spoke a little girlish lisp that had seemed cute to Gus when they were dating, and very came out vewy.
“Me either,” Gus said.
As they had the first sexual encounter of their marriage, she lay very still, with her eyes closed. He’d thought about this time a lot, about her trim, sturdy little body naked in his bed. He’d imagined a more erotic consummation. The whores he’d had on R and R in Tokyo had been lively. He knew that much of that had been pretense. But they had been fun. And they seemed, some of them, to enjoy it. Of course Peggy was no whore, and it was her first time.
She’s scared, he thought.
Sometimes she seemed to clench as if in pain.
“You okay?” Gus said. “Am I hurting you?”
Eyes closed, she shook her head grimly.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Go ahead.”
He tried to be careful.
She’ll relax in a while, Gus thought, and it’ll be better.
1960
Gus
“You’ve got to get me some help,” Peggy said. She was on her first bourbon. Gus knew he had maybe ten more minutes before she would be drunk and there was no further talking to her. They were at the kitchen table. Chris was on the floor playing with an assortment of plastic cowboys and Indians Gus had bought him.
“We got no money, Peg.”
“Well, damn it, get some. He never lets me alone.”
“He’s a little kid,” Gus said. “You’re his mother.”
“He never goes out, he never goes three feet away from me. See him, right under the damn table. It’s as far as he gets.”
She drank her bourbon. About five more minutes, Gus thought.
“I think it’s better if we talk about this later, Peg.”
“So the little darling won’t hear?”
“Can’t be good stuff for him to listen to.”
“Maybe he’ll learn something,” Peggy said. “Give me some rest. You better do something, Gus. Or I’ll be in the hospital.”
Gus looked at his son. Chris’s nose was running and he had a cough. Gus could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was listening, and Gus knew how smart he was. Chris would understand what they were saying. Gus felt very heavy.
“Peggy,” Gus said, “every day about ten thousand women have about ten thousand babies and take care of them without having a damned breakdown. For Crissake, take care of your kid. You’re his mother.”
She finished the bourbon and poured some more, with a new ice cube. She was heavy now. She’d never lost the weight she’d put on when she was carrying Chris.
“You’re out there every day in your uniform with your shiny badge, and your big gun. You stand around, drink coffee, direct some traffic, flirt with all the girls. And you think you work hard. Well, let me tell you something about work, Mister Big Shot policeman. You should change a few thousand shitty diapers. Maybe you’d know something. Three years old and not even potty trained.”
Gus took in some air. He’d changed enough diapers, but he knew there was no point arguing. He felt as if his whole self was in a contraction. He thought of hitting her. Even the thought of it was a kind of release. He looked at Chris, sitting stiffly on the floor, moving the toy figures intensely about.
He said, “I’ll get you some money, Peg,” and stood and scooped his son up in his arms. “Let’s you and me go out to the store and buy a toy or something.”
The boy was stiff in his father’s arms. As they left the kitchen, Gus could feel Chris staring over his shoulder at his mother.
“Don’t hurry back,” Peggy said.
1994
Voice-Over
“They didn’t know what to do with me,” I said. “I wasn’t like anything they’d ever exp
ected, if they ever actually thought about what they expected.”
“Most people probably don’t,” Grace said. “They think, We’ll get married and have children, and have some vague image of the Gerber baby gurgling on their knee.”
“Not us,” I said.
“No.”
“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Grace smiled, though not very much.
“Maybe you are not Prince Hamlet, nor were meant to be?”
She never said things at random, like I did, simply because they popped into her head. Her mind didn’t work associatively. She was encouraging me, though not very much.
“I always remember,” I said, “when my father would go to work when I was a little kid, I was scared, because I felt like there was no one to take care of us.”
“You and Peggy.”
“Yeah.”
“God,” Grace said, “how awful.”
“For her too, I suppose. I’m way past liking her. Or forgiving her, for that matter. She was pretty unforgivable. But I can sympathize with her. She was overmatched. Here I was this sickly precocious kid, smarter than she was when I was very young—and I knew it at some scary, not quite conscious level. I entered very early into a conspiracy to pretend that she was not more childlike than her child.”
“You probably scared her,” Grace said.
“Sure. Because she also knew at some not quite conscious level that she was more childlike than her child, that she herself needed to be taken care of, so how was she supposed to take care of me? She was scared because she didn’t know what to do. Scared because she seemed to have no maternal instinct to trust, scared because her husband seemed to know what to do and seemed to have a parental instinct and seemed to trust it and seemed to take better care of me than of her, though she needed it as badly as I did. If she lost him, not his love, and apparently not his lovemaking, but if she had lost his—what—his adult-ness, it would have been as bad as if I lost him. We’d both have been orphans in the storm.”
“And that,” Grace said, “made her mad as hell.”
“At him, at me. Every day. Every day that he was able to take care of me when she couldn’t, every day when he had to take care of her when she couldn’t, every day it rammed home her failure, and her helplessness, and every day enraged her.”
Grace had made some smoked turkey sandwiches with yellow mustard on whole wheat bread. We were eating them and drinking tea, at her counter. The limb of a tree outside was thrashing in the wind and its movement, alternately shadowing and revealing the snow-blurred streetlamp at the end of the parking lot, made sporadic patterns on the high stark white wall of her living room.
“You seem to understand her plight very well,” Grace said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Funny you should notice.”
Grace had cut the sandwiches diagonally into triangles; she took a significant bite of the pointed end of one.
“So what did he do?” she said.
“Gus? He got me away from her as much as he could. Which was hard, because he had to work. He was our sole financial support. But he’d take me places, and then he got some money.”
“Un-huh,” Grace said.
“I guess we know where….” I said.
“By blackmailing my father,” Grace said.
“Yeah … For me, I think. So I could go to a private kindergarten. I hated the kindergarten and it scared me to be away from my mother. But it calmed her down a little. That way she had mornings free, and only had to deal with me until my father came home, if he was working days. If he was working nights, she didn’t have to deal with me at all, because he’d get up when I came home from kindergarten, and play with me. I was too shy to play with other kids, and it must have driven my father crazy, because I wasn’t interested in anything he knew anything about. I didn’t like baseball, or fishing, stuff like that.”
“So what did he do with you?”
“He read to me a lot, and we went to museums and historical restorations and places: Plymouth Plantation, Old Ironsides, the Museum of Fine Arts.”
“Gus doesn’t seem like a Fine Arts kind of person,” Grace said.
“But I was,” Chris said. “It was less the exhibits than the place. Museums are a controlled environment. I liked that. I felt safer there.”
“Was your mother better?”
“At least different. Gus had hung it up, really. He never argued with her. They didn’t talk much or go out much. They slept in twin beds, and I’m sure that’s all they did. I think she was probably relieved that she didn’t have to … ah …” I looked for a word.
“Service him,” Grace said.
“Yeah.”
“So it was better.”
“It was quieter, but they still had their battle, and I was the place they fought it. My father had no one else to love. My mother was jealous of it and wanted me for herself. Not as a child, but as a playmate, or maybe plaything, I don’t know. To her I think I was more like an anatomically correct doll. And once I reached a point where I was less dependent, didn’t require her to be a grown-up, then we sort of got on better. There was a period, a kind of stasis, after I had become less needy, and before I became too smart, when she could sort of relate to me like a plaything, or a pet.”
“But you had your father, you knew he loved you.”
“Yeah. I knew that, but sometimes I would think he loved her. In retrospect he didn’t, he was just trying to find a way to make her a mother for me. But the stakes were too high when I was little. I couldn’t afford any uncertainty.”
“Poor Gus,” Grace said.
“Yeah, he’s a pretty straight-ahead guy, not stupid, but I think probably not so complicated then as he’s become, and he was faced at home with this dysfunctional wife and this odd little kid that he loved. And he couldn’t make it work.”
“And he had a mother too,” Grace said.
“Yeah, and she was no day at the beach either.”
“But he did love you and he does.”
“Oh, God, yes,” I said. “Too much probably.”
“Sort of a variation on the Sheridan tradition,” Grace said.
“We are an obsessive lot,” I said.
1970
Chris
He went with his father to Fenway Park. He was fourteen and disinterested. He was agile enough and, like the grandfather he’d never met, he was tall and naturally strong, but he didn’t like sports. He never had. He’d rather have gone to the movies. He felt sullen as they went in, got peanuts and a program, and walked up through the stairwells. His father paused at the top of the stairs and looked at the bright green space, for a moment. Chris found the gesture really assy.
They were behind the first base dugout in some box seats that someone had given Gus. The Red Sox were playing Detroit. Chris didn’t even know what the Detroit team was called, and he didn’t want to know.
“See this guy,” Gus said, pointing, “the guy in right for the Tigers?”
That’s what they were called. Big deal
“That’s Al Kaline.”
Like it matters.
“I know you don’t know him, but just remember him. Someday you’ll be proud to tell people you saw him.”
In the box next to them was a man, his wife, and four boys. All of them had baseball gloves. The older two had scorecards, as did the man. The mother was still attractive. Her hair was blond. Her eyes were shaded by a big straw hat. She held the smallest boy on her lap, and pointed things out to him softly. The father and mother brushed against each other often in the box and when they did they usually looked at each other and grinned. They looked at each other often when one of the boys said something they liked. And they grinned when they did that too.
“They gonna pitch Lolich today?” one of the kids asked in that annoying know-it-all way kids had when they talked sports.
“Bad news for Yaz,” his brother said.
“Look at the arms on Willie Horton,” his f
ather said.
“Which one’s he?”
“Black guy down there by the batting cage.”
Chris looked at the thickly muscled black man standing next to what must have been the batting cage. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You like this okay?” Gus said. “You don’t like it we don’t have to stay, you know? Tickets were free, don’t cost us anything either way.”
“I don’t want to leave,” Chris said.
The game started, and Chris watched it as hard as he could, but nothing much seemed to happen and when something did happen it didn’t look very interesting. And he was never sure when he should cheer. The four boys in the next box were raucous and excited. Chris found them irritating. He looked at his father and saw him glance at the boys and their mother and father. And a surge of recognition went through him. Suddenly and clearly he experienced his father’s loss. He would later think of it as an epiphany. The people in the box next to them were what Gus had hoped to be. The woman in the next booth holding the small boy on her lap leaned over and whispered in her husband’s ear, he whispered something back, and she reddened a little and they both laughed, and Chris saw before him the unutterable gulf which loomed beneath his father, and experienced it as if it were his gulf, and knew for a moment what his father had lost and never spoken of, as if he had lost it.
He looked at the big man beside him, thick bodied as a tree stump, as unyielding as adamantine. His father looked at him and smiled and put one of his thick arms around Chris’s shoulders and patted his upper arm.
“It’s nice of you to come with me, Chris,” he said. “I know it’s not your favorite thing to do.”
And Chris nodded without speaking and looked away toward the game in progress so that his father wouldn’t see the tears which filled his eyes and blurred the bright green field before him.
1974
Gus
When Gus dropped him off at college, it was the first time Chris had been away from home. They drove up alone. The car was packed with things Peggy had decided Chris would need at college, but Peggy’s back hurt her, she said, and the long ride would aggravate it, and then she’d have to stay in a motel, and she could never sleep in a strange bed.
All Our Yesterdays Page 15