The Love Children

by Marylin French

  “I look like my father’s great-grandaunt,” I said.

  “Wow! You can trace your family back that far?”

  “My father’s family, yes. We have pictures. And a genealogy book.”

  “Cool. We don’t. We only have one picture of one grandfather—the one who survived the Nazis—and one aunt, and that was when they were old, after they got out. All the other pictures were lost.”

  Many members of Sandy’s family had been lost in the Holocaust, and every time I thought about that, I felt tears welling. It had all happened before we were even born, but it was in our hearts when we sat around smoking and feeling bad; it grieved us, along with slavery in the United States and Hiroshima and the war in Vietnam, part of the pain that we carried everywhere we went.

  Sandy saw me falling into the bleak mood that overcame me whenever I started to think about this, and she changed the subject.

  “How’s Steve?”

  I shrugged. “I think he’s given up on me.”

  “He wouldn’t! He loves you!”

  “Yeah, but maybe he’s tired of waiting,” I said miserably. “You know.”

  She gazed at me.

  “He wants me to get birth control, but I can’t seem to get it together.”

  “That means you’re not ready for sex,” she said with supreme assurance. “That’s what my father says. The summer my sister was going to summer camp as a counselor, he asked her if she wanted birth control. And she said no. And he said that she probably wasn’t ready for sex, and that was okay, not to worry. He said he was really proud of her for knowing you shouldn’t do it when you’re not ready. ‘Because if you do it against your will, you are violating yourself,’ he said. He says when you’re ready, you’ll know. She told me about it when I turned sixteen, after my birthday dinner. I thought he was amazing.”

  “But if she wanted it, it was okay to do it?”

  “Yeah. He says ours is the first generation raised in sexual freedom. He says when he was young, sex was taboo for unmarried people, that it was considered dirty. He said that was one reason he became a psychoanalyst. He said they got over it, but he doesn’t want us to have that happen to us.”

  “But how do you know when you’re ready?”

  “I’m not sure. He told Rhoda she would know, and I guess she did, because she and Roger definitely get it on now.”

  “How old is Rhoda now?”

  “Twenty-four. She’ll get her PhD in June. She finished her dissertation. It’s on this really weird French guy called Derrida. It may even be published!”

  We moved on to other things, but the subject of Philo really interested Sandy and she returned to him repeatedly. The next time I saw her, she asked about him. And the time after that too.

  I was still distressed about Steve. I loved him, but I had these odd feelings about sex, with him or anybody else. I loved Bishop; his gangly body and disconnected air drew me like a magnet, but he didn’t seem interested in sex and I wasn’t sure I was either. In all the years I’d loved Bishop, he’d kissed me hello and good-bye plenty of times, but he never came on to me or to Sandy either. Although we were both in love with him, he was off limits. But if I’d found out that he had come on to Sandy, it would have broken my heart or corroded it with jealousy.

  These confused sexual feelings lived like a nest of worms in my poor brain. They had me nearly sick sometimes; I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was relieved when Steve wasn’t around and I could spend Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons with Sandy, Bishop, and Dolores. Of course, it was getting so just hanging out and talking wasn’t enough for the boys—they wanted something more. And they always knew how to get it. Steve always had dope, Bishop always had booze. Actually, Bishop always had dope too. We’d meet at the west gate of Harvard Yard and walk down to the Charles and sit on a bench and smoke and get mellow. We’d see guys sculling on the river, and masses of people walking across the bridge, and sometimes a sailboat would pass. I would think about a line from T. S. Eliot, and it made me mad at myself: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Why did I always think that, when these people were alive? We’d watch them until it got too cold to sit around outside.

  Then we’d go to my house or gather in Bishop’s basement. They had a pool table in their rec room and Bishop taught us how to play. We couldn’t smoke dope there, but we could smoke cigarettes. We could have sodas or beer or even hard liquor if we wanted it, but we girls never drank. We didn’t like it. Bishop’s father was police commissioner and they had lots of money. His mother ordered cases of soda and had them delivered by the liquor store along with booze and wine and beer every week. I envied them, this big Catholic family, so easygoing, always joking around, just as I envied Sandy her cool, refined, sophisticated Jewish parents. Just goes to show you how crazy envy is. What did the Greeks say? Call no man happy until he’s dead and you know the ending. Well, if you knew their endings, you wouldn’t envy anybody. Ever.

  6

  Toward the end of my junior year, on May 1, 1970, the United States invaded Cambodia. I couldn’t believe it. Here we were all marching and protesting, saying, End the war, and the government decides to extend it. A few days later, there was a huge demonstration, a peace march. My friends and I went; even some of our teachers went. My mother went with her friends. Not all her friends went—some taught at BU and BU’s president was very conservative, not to say reactionary, and punished people who were antiwar by withholding raises, even though they were legally entitled to them. Some were too intimidated to show up, Mom said. But lots went anyway, like Philo and a history professor Mom knew from her antiwar group, who she said was really brilliant and a wonderful historian and had written a groundbreaking book, but he never got a raise the whole time he worked at BU, forty years or something. He was tenured, so the president couldn’t fire him, but he punished him.

  All along the route of the march there were men watching us. It made me nervous. Some of them seemed like FBI or CIA or DEA or whatever, with cameras, but some looked more like construction workers, and they were the ones I was afraid of. I imagined they might suddenly attack us. People’s rage was so blatant that you could imagine extreme actions. And lots of people in the march were openly smoking pot. Smoking weed in those days was a badge of subversion. We walked until we reached the Common and then we spread out across the grass. We looked like millions of people, but everyone was peaceful, I wasn’t scared at all when I looked around. I could smell the dope in the air. People stood up and gave speeches against the war—which was great. But the greatest thing was the feeling, the sense that we were together, thousands of people, fighting for tolerance and peace, an end to mass killing. We were a peace-loving crowd, the love children, here to uphold life and freedom not just in our own country but in Vietnam and Cambodia too. We were here to testify that life was not just a matter of competition for power and grabbing for money; that there were other ways to live, ways that made people happy, not miserable.

  When it ended, we drifted away. It was an easy end, people sauntering across the bridges, down Commonwealth Avenue, up to the T. I ended up at Bishop’s friend’s house, a member of his church named Walter. His parents were in Europe. They had a big old house on Brattle Street, and we sat in the kitchen, smoking and eating stuff his mom had left for him in the freezer—hamburgers and hot dogs, canned beans and spaghetti. We discussed the war, well, some of us did, the ones who read the newspapers, like Sandy and Bishop and Walter, who knew what was happening. We were so mellow by the end of the day we were nearly paralyzed, but around nine I wandered home, where Mom and Philo were pretty mellow too. I thought all of life could be like this if people just let themselves love each other.

  The good feelings from the peace march were still hanging in the air when the next thing happened, and that should have taught me the way life is, except I wasn’t ready to learn it. It leaped out at us from television one night; we saw it just the way we’d seen Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald, t
he way, years later, we’d see bombs exploding in Iraq and an airplane fly into the World Trade Center and not know if we were seeing something real or a movie.

  What we saw on TV was a college campus, with young, bloody bodies strewn across it. The government itself, the government of the state of Ohio, had sent soldiers to shoot these college students at Kent State, for protesting. Everyone was horrified: we were on the phone all evening and the next day. For days, no one talked about anything else. My friends and I kept thinking that those kids who were shot could have been us; Mom was thinking the same thing. It changed the minds of lots of people who before had not been against the war. The worst thing was that Kent State happened so soon after the peace march. Was this a foreshadowing of what was going to happen in the war? Would the government punish us for protesting the war by prolonging it? Or by shooting more of us?

  Yet ordinary life continued, as it always does. I love that poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden about the Breughel painting of Icarus. The painter shows Icarus in the sky falling, far off in the distance, while in the foreground a peasant pushes a plow through the dark soil. He’s sweaty and tired, paying no attention at all to the tiny figure falling behind him, and Auden says they were right, the old masters, because they knew that life goes on as always, no matter how terrible events may be. When my generation of ordinary kids weren’t worrying about the draft, they just worried about getting into college and which college to choose. At the time, it seemed a world-shaking choice and many of us planned to spend the summer taking car trips with our parents to various schools. The serious world was inching closer to us, and we felt it with excitement and cold dread, an open door leading, we hoped, to heaven; we feared, to hell. We were also taking exams that would brand us for what felt then like the rest of our lives; we were about to be put in categories we might never be able to alter.

  I was applying to Simmons, in Boston, so I went over there on the T and looked around. It was a nice place, and I started to get excited, but Mom thought it would be good for me to go away from home, and I liked that idea too. On the one hand, staying home would allow me more freedom, because some colleges still made girls obey strict rules—no smoking in the dorm, no drinking, getting in by ten at night and midnight on weekends. I hated rules in general, but I was willing to obey them if everybody else had to. What annoyed me was that boys didn’t, only girls. Did the people in charge think that girls were too simpleminded to be in charge of themselves? On the other hand, if I stayed in Cambridge with all my friends gone, I’d feel forsaken. The idea of going away was exciting. Mom’s college would pay half my tuition and Dad said he’d pay the rest, so I didn’t have to worry about money, like Dolores and Steve.

  Dolores’s father didn’t want her to go to college. He wanted her to stay home and get a job to help out and take care of the house because her mother was kind of broken down and didn’t do much housework. But Dolores rebelled and said she’d run away if he didn’t let her go to college, and so finally he said he’d pay tuition, but nothing else. So she had to go locally. UMass in Boston was the cheapest place because it was a state school; and it was pretty good too. She cried at the thought of going to college on the T, but her grades had fallen so precipitously in the past two years that she was lucky to get in there. She used to be one of the smart kids. As it turned out, she didn’t go to college for very long. But that’s another story.

  Sandy’s father drove her to Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar, and she loved them all, but she finally decided on Smith, where Rhoda had gone. Bishop visited Wesleyan, Amherst, and Yale; I knew all along he’d choose Yale. And Steve got into Harvard.

  He had been hanging around outside Barnes one day when I came out. I thought maybe he missed me after all. When I saw him at the side door we always used, my heart jumped a little. He must have still loved me a little or he wouldn’t have been there. And I was embarrassed too. I felt I’d let him down . . .

  I had to work that afternoon, but I invited him for dinner and he said he would come. It turned out we were having pasta that night. Mom would never have planned pasta if she’d known Steve was coming, and she apologized as I set the table. “It’s what I have,” she said, “What can I do?”

  “He’ll like it, Mom,” I said. She simmered tomatoes with garlic and added fresh basil leaves at the end; her sauce always tasted fresh. And we had veal chops with it and a wonderful salad with avocado and red onion. Steve ate with gusto, saying the spaghetti was delicious, nothing like his grandmother’s. Then he wiped his mouth with his napkin and put down his fork and said, “Mrs. Leighton, I got into Harvard.”

  “That’s great, Steve!” she cried.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got in because I’m black.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I get C’s. I got in because I’m black.” He said this as though he was throwing it at her.

  She was almost angry. “Don’t knock it, Steve,” she said. “You may not think it’s fair, but it’s an attempt to make up for hundreds of years of a different kind of unfairness. You should have more respect for yourself and for Harvard: you’re very bright, and somebody at Harvard saw that. Lots of the kids that get in, kids whose fathers went to Harvard and boys from rich families, like the Kennedys, don’t have great grades either.”

  “And Kennedy cheated.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You really think that?”

  “What, that he cheated?”

  “No. That someone there thought I was smart?”

  “Of course!” she nearly exploded. “You think every black kid who applies gets in?”

  Steve thought about that for a while. “I guess not.”

  “You’re letting the arguments of resentful white people determine your values. Don’t let them define you. Make the most of your chance!” she urged.

  Steve nodded. I wasn’t sure he understood her argument. I wasn’t sure I did. But there was something in Steve, something hard and stubborn that wouldn’t let him feel good about himself. I tried to build him up all the time; when we first met, I was sure that I could improve his confidence. But I knew better now.

  Mom and I had gone on the college tour in June after my junior year. We visited Vassar and Mount Holyoke and UMass at Amherst, but the place I loved was Andrews, a small college in northern Vermont known for its arts programs and liberal dorm regulations. The campus was small and pretty, dotted with birch, pine, maple, and oak trees, and the dorms were coed! They were really ahead of the times. The girls were as free as the boys, allowed to come and go as they chose, and they had a great faculty—artists, composers, and writers. I thought I wanted to write; I imagined becoming a poet. I wrote poetry on and off, especially when I was high. You could write a novel or a long poem for your senior thesis. No other college allowed that in those days.

  When we got home, I had a long talk with Philo about college. He wanted me to go to Barnard or Smith or Wellesley or Harvard, even though it was local, someplace, he said, “seriously intellectual.” I was flattered that he thought of me that way, but that wasn’t the way I thought of myself. I said I didn’t think I was that smart. He insisted I was. “How many kids your age know Emily Dickinson the way you do? Or have ever heard of Marvell?”

  “Umm,” I mumbled. It was one thing to like poetry, another to be a physicist. He was thinking of me as if I could be a physicist, and I couldn’t. I knew that. But I liked that he thought I was so smart. I said I’d think about it, but of course I didn’t.

  Sandy planned to be pre-med, and Bishop to study political science. He wanted to go into politics, or maybe teach it. We had meandering conversations about what we wanted to be. We were all pretty happy, thinking about going away, and we strode through the Cambridge streets laughing aloud. Knowing that we would soon be separated gave an edge to our feelings. We said we’d never forget each other, no matter what. Once we were in college, we’d visit each other for long weekends, sleeping on the floor of each others’ dorm rooms, and cal
l or write each other regularly.

  “We can write a chain letter,” Bishop suggested. “I’ll start it. I’ll send it to Sandy, who will add on and send it to Jess, who will add on and send it to me. Then I’ll add on and send it to Jess, who will add on and send it to Sandy. What do you think?”

  “Terrific!”

  “When it gets too long, we’ll put the old pages in a binder and save the entire thing. For years!”

  “We’ll be famous! Like Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot!” Sandy was breathless at the thought.

  It didn’t seem inconceivable to me. If there was any justice in the world, they would grow up to do great things and get famous. Sandy would become a doctor and cure some terrible disease and win the Nobel Prize; Bishop would become president of the United States, or at least governor of Massachusetts or mayor of Boston for sure. He was already president of our senior class. And I would be a poet and wear a long straight gown and a big hat, and be invited to read from the stage like Marianne Moore, who came to Barnes one time. Wouldn’t it be great to have our own little world like Virginia and Leonard Woolf and all their friends, people like—my God!—T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster! That’s what I longed for: a life in which I’d know sophisticated people who understood life and literature and art and were smart and nice and everybody loved each other.

  Philo had become an installation at our house. It was cool the way he wove himself into our lives. On weekends when we didn’t go anywhere, Mom worked in her study, and he sat in the living room reading, or worked at the dining-room table, note cards and books spread out, until dinner time. They could work for hours at a time, not seeing each other or talking, yet taking pleasure in knowing the other was there. That’s the kind of man I wanted to marry, someone who could be with me in silent pleasure.

  At dinnertime, Mom would come downstairs to start cooking, and Philo would pack up his notes and go into the kitchen, offering to help. If I was home, I went to the kitchen too. I liked to be part of it, the three of us peeling and chopping vegetables together, setting the table, stirring the sauce. We’d put the news on television, or music on the radio, or a record on the stereo. Philo loved Mozart and Dvorák and Mom loved Bach and Richard Strauss and Mahler, and they’d take turns in what they listened to. Philo said Mom’s music made him want to lie down. She said Philo didn’t love music, he just loved to dance, and he did tend to hop around when his music was on. Their arguments were dotted with laughter.