“Like you supported Mom?” I said, wincing inside.
“Yeah. She got the car and I got the car payments,” he snarled. He looked absolutely disgusted and plunged into his drink as if my nastiness had driven him to it.
Saturday night he took us to a local restaurant, where he ordered a large steak, a baked potato with sour cream, and a lot of whiskey. He often looked flushed these days, and I wondered if that was healthy. That night he asked me about Andrews. I was careful in my answers. I felt guilty for being snarky the night before, and had vowed to try to be nicer. Of course, I never knew what would set him off, but I tried to soft-pedal the more liberal aspects of the place. I talked about its arts programs, the great writers on its faculty, the beauty of the campus. I figured he would like my being in Vermont. I tried to bring up as many names as possible because I knew that the one thing that would make him like Andrews was hearing the name of someone he knew on its faculty, but no name I mentioned seemed familiar to him. It seemed I just generally annoyed him, and he lost himself in his drinks the same as he had the night before.
It didn’t matter about my room, because I didn’t go back to that house very often. Julie did eventually turn it into a dollhouse room. Well, why not? It was her house. I felt like a stranger there. I could only skirt my father’s life: he did almost no talking. He stayed in zombie gear most of the time he lived with Julie; if he erupted into his second persona, I didn’t see it. But maybe he did, because Julie left him a few years later. Until then, when you went there, you were really visiting Julie—who wasn’t all that interesting.
He loved me; I kept reminding myself of that. But his mind was elsewhere. It wasn’t with Julie or Mom or me. Maybe it was with his painting. Maybe he saw colors. Or maybe he was thinking about smoking and drinking. What he felt for me was something he’d buried deep in his heart, years ago. Every time I thought about him, my heart broke again. What broke my heart wasn’t anything he was doing to me, or even anything he was doing to himself; it was just what he was. I don’t know how to explain this, even now; I didn’t know then, and couldn’t have spoken about it to anyone, not even Sandy, not even Mom. I felt as though he was a walking ruin of something that wanted to be, that started out to be fine and noble and good. But he collapsed, imploded.
Still, it was on that visit that I got my first insight into his painting. I went into his studio one morning before he’d staggered out there with his mug of coffee, and I walked around and looked at all the paintings in different stages of completion and a few that were finished and leaned, drying, against the wall. They were big paintings, at that time almost all cerise and gray, with purple or black streaks and sometimes a yellow patch.
And suddenly I was overwhelmed by them. I felt them rushing at me, like nature overflowing, like rage pouring out of my father. They expressed uncontainable, animal energy. I began to see why people said he was great; and it came to me that maybe he was and that maybe it was worth it to him to pay for it with his life.
It would not be worth it to me. Did that mean I would never be a poet?
Sandy, Bishop, and I had exchanged a round of letters before the first intimations of disaster began to ripple, right around Thanksgiving, when I was home for the holidays. At first, the story had no connection with anyone I knew: several weeks earlier a Cambridge cop had been charged with taking bribes. A man who had just been promoted to captain of the police force was ordered to investigate long-standing rumors of police involvement in a drug ring in the city. An ambitious idealist, he followed his orders scrupulously and so became the first cop to look into the drug rumors seriously. His efforts gained him an ally, a political columnist for a Boston paper. The columnist had a team of informants, and he publicized the campaign. At Thanksgiving, he hinted that upper-level Cambridge cops were involved. I wasn’t very interested in local news. I read this article only because Mom had called it to my attention, knowing that Bishop’s father was police commissioner. When I went back to Andrews, I asked Mom to follow the story and send me clippings if anything more happened.
In the next weeks, she sent me a few clippings. To save himself, a cop who had been accused agreed to inform on a ring of other officers taking bribes from drug dealers. Actually, if you thought about it, it was obvious that this was happening. Otherwise, why would it be so easy to get drugs in Cambridge? Or any place? There had to be whole systems of people passing them on, each stop skimming a little from the pot, and the police had to be agreeing not to notice. At Monaghan’s, where Steve worked, you could get weed, mushrooms, amphetamines, anything at all.
When I came home again a few days before Christmas, Mom met me at the bus station and told me that the columnist was hinting that the commissioner of police was implicated—Bishop’s father! The papers were full of talk about the ring of cops and rumors of higher-ups involved.
For dinner that night, Mom and I made a navarin. We stood in the kitchen together peeling tiny white onions and thin green beans. As it simmered, I called Bishop. He answered the phone, the same vague, dreamy Bishop, and I realized I didn’t know what to say. I was home, I said, and how was he, and had he seen Sandy, and how was Yale and had he seen Steve and would he like to get together. I didn’t mention his father. He said everything was okay, yeah, he just hadn’t had time to write, he was so busy. Yale was great, he hadn’t seen Sandy, he hadn’t seen Steve either, he didn’t know if Steve was going to Harvard or not, he never went into Monaghan’s. Sure, we should get together, but he had promised his mother he’d drive her around this week to do her Christmas chores—getting the tree, ordering food, buying presents. He’d call me when he had some free time.
I put the phone down with a bad feeling. Bishop had always had time for me.
Always.
I called Sandy.
No, she hadn’t called Bishop, she was too nervous, didn’t want to upset him, didn’t know what the situation was. Sure, she could have lunch with me tomorrow, she had loads to tell me, Smith was great! Really great! She loved it, loved her roommate!
We met at Bailey’s, our usual place, and giggled and told truths through a three-hour lunch of a cheese sandwich and three cups of coffee. Our poor roommates’ every secret lay revealed before we were through. Neither of us knew anything new about Bishop or his family.
Bishop’s father was arrested in March, so Sandy and I weren’t around to give Bishop attention. Our mothers kept us informed, and we both called him, first at Yale, and then at home. He wasn’t at Yale, and nobody answered the phone at the Cambridge house. The newspapers were full of Commissioner Connolly, who was accused of receiving payoffs over many years. He said he was innocent, but the headlines screamed corruption and there were photographs of him showing up at court with a fake smile on his face, and his lawyer beside him and little Mrs. Connolly clutching his arm, smiling also, right on the front page of all the Boston newspapers. I called on and off all week, hard as it was to call long distance from the dorm (the phone was on the wall of the common room on the first floor), calling Sandy in between. She was having no luck either. By early June, there was a weird machine hooked up to the Connolly’s phone, some new invention, a machine answering the telephone! I didn’t recognize the voice on the machine; I think it must have been Bishop’s brother-in-law, Francis, saying the Connollys were unavailable but to please leave a message and they would return your call and to wait until the signal to start talking. The first time we heard this, we both just hung up in shock, but after that we spoke into the mechanical device. Bishop never called us back, so finally Sandy and I each wrote Bishop a letter and sent it to the Cambridge house.
Neither of us heard from him again. He vanished out of our lives. People said that the family had sold their house and that Mrs. Connolly and the younger boys lived in an apartment outside Boston and that she had a job working in a school cafeteria. We didn’t know if this was true. By the end of the summer, Mr. Connolly was in jail. He had pleaded no contest and been sentenced to five years in
a minimum security prison. It was horrible to picture cheerful Mr. Connolly in jail. It was horrible to picture poor overworked Mrs. Connolly with her worried forehead, standing all day behind a steam table ladling food onto plates, then going home to her many sons in a cramped apartment.
Then we heard that Patrick, the second-oldest son, had been killed in Vietnam.
My heart hurt thinking about all of them, remembering how, when our gang would pile into their house, they always welcomed us with smiles. They’d urge us to have a Coke, a beer, some peanuts. They were a golden family, full of well-being, affection, and generosity. It was the Connollys I thought of when I read War and Peace and came to the Rostovs. It was the Connollys who had strengthened my belief that if people lived the right way, they could have happiness and good luck all their days.
Now suddenly, I couldn’t offer to help, couldn’t find them to tell them I was sorry about what happened to them. Sandy and I clung to each other, telephoning each other and writing every week, but after a few months we forgot it, or I did, being the fickle thing I am.
8
I loved college, everything about it: the beauty of the Green Mountains, the freedom of living without a mother or father around, the thrilling new people I met who shimmered with the glamour of the unknown. Above all I loved what I was learning. I encountered books by authors I hadn’t known existed—they weren’t from long ago, like Austen or Trollope or Henry James, or new, like Lessing and Solzhenitsyn, but in between—I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and André Malraux’s Man’s Fate. They were about recent times, times when I was alive yet knew nothing about. They opened up whole new worlds to me. They put the Vietnam War in a new context and made me realize how innocent—ignorant, really—my protesting had been. I was still against war after reading those books, but not as I had been. Somebody had to fight against the horrors described in these books, just like my father had said. Even my mother agreed that Hitler had to be defeated. It had never occurred to me that some wars were, if not good, necessary, and some were not. I was fundamentally against war itself, against humans trying to dominate other humans, but after I read these writers, the problem seemed more complicated.
Freshmen couldn’t take creative writing courses, but I joined the poetry club. I never got up the nerve to read anything of my own aloud, but my juices flowed with the stimulus of being there, and I was writing poems at a hectic pace. Different kids showed up there each week, but the core of it was five girls (including me) and three guys, one named Christopher Hurley. The guys were snobs, mocking almost everybody. They looked down on the girls, which made me nervous. But they were all really nice to me for some reason. I especially liked Christopher. He was older than me, a junior, and he wrote poems about science, culling it for metaphors, especially about time and space. To me he seemed profound. I knew the concept: time and space were a continuum, two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. I wasn’t sure I really understood it, but I loved to listen to him read and I tried to talk to him when we all went out for drinks together after the meeting. He didn’t seem to particularly notice me. Still, I believed he liked me without knowing it. He was very serious.
I had a terrific lit teacher, Dr. Ruth Stauffer, a dynamic woman around Mom’s age and, like Mom, good looking and with a nice figure and nice clothes; she wore pants to class. There weren’t many women on the faculty, and the few there were wore skirts. I wore jeans; everybody did, with boots and sweaters. That was our uniform. Ruth (she told us to call her Ruth) had us read Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum,and Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T.,which knocked me out. We read Lessing’s TheFour-Gated City, which was great, and then In Pursuit of the English, which was a hoot. We had such lively discussions in lit class that we groaned when the class bell rang, and we often hung around afterward.
Ruth started “Fridays at Four,” an informal gathering for us to discuss books or anything else we wanted to talk about. She invited faculty members and students to come and talk about their favorite writer or poet or artist or whatever else they were interested in. Professors who were boring in class came alive when they started to talk about their passions. There was a biology professor who loved Gerard Manley Hopkins and read his poetry to us in a velvety voice. A math professor came with slides of the beautiful little boxes by Joseph Cornell. A French professor who loved George Sand but never got to teach her talked for over an hour one afternoon and kept us all rapt. He told us about Sand’s involvement in the 1848 French Revolution and how she left her husband and went to Paris and dressed as a man so she could go to the theater and feel free in the streets. She took lots of lovers, among them Chopin and Alfred de Musset. We learned that her writing influenced all of Europe and America, inspiring Marx, Bakunin, Dostoevsky, Walt Whitman, Balzac, and Flaubert. She was the first author to write about poor people. The professor read from a novel about the poor, Francois le Champi, The Country Waif in English. I was so excited by Sand that I ran to the bookstore to get all her books. But they didn’t have any—not one. There were two in the library; I read them both.
Afternoons like that were inspiring, and I felt that this was what college was supposed to be. After lectures, Ruth served sherry and cheese, which made us feel grown up and civilized. The glasses were tiny and there were as many faculty as students, so no one drank too much.
I also took political science, a survey of different forms and theories of government. Unfortunately the teacher was boring, and my mind would drift to Bishop, who had intended to major in poli sci. It was an early class, nine a.m., so I often cut. Nobody took attendance at Andrews, so it didn’t matter. I wondered if Bishop liked Yale; I wondered if he felt comfortable there and if he was taking the same poli sci course as I was. I would have liked to write him long letters about it, to ask what he thought about these theories of government. I did start a letter to him, writing three or four pages, but lost it before I could mail it.
During my freshman year, I fell in love every couple of weeks. My attitude toward sex was evolving, and I decided that I had to get over my hesitations and just do it. A number of guys were pursuing me; the most ardent and indefatigable was Donny Karl. He looked somewhat depraved; he had a thin face with sunken cheeks and cold eyes that I imagined glittered with desire. He looked so sophisticated that I thought he must know all about love. I wasn’t crazy about him, but his wicked appearance and his infatuation with me seemed enough. I warned my roommates what was coming and, one rainy Saturday afternoon, locked both my doors and went to bed with him. Afterward, I was shocked: this was the great thing everybody panted for?
When I told Patsy it was a big nothing, she said that if I was disappointed, Donny hadn’t known what he was doing. I denied I was disappointed; I insisted I was just not impressed. But her words stayed in my mind, and I started to review Donny’s acts and realized he had been sort of clumsy and stupid. Maybe his looks were deceiving?
She had said, “You know what an orgasm is, don’t you? You masturbate, right?”
I said, “Sure.” But masturbate! Certainly not! What an idea! Not that I hadn’t done a little exploration of my body. But whenever I began to feel something ripple through my flesh, when my heartbeat speeded up and my loins began to throb, I pulled back, because I felt I was doing something bad. But what Patsy said made me think about this and the next time it happened, I let my hands continue their activity, and even exercised some ingenuity, and before long, Whammo!
So that’s what it was all about.
I abandoned Donny and looked for partners I felt more about, not that there’s really any way to be sure sex will be good with anybody. I just thought it would be better if I felt something for the guy, which hadn’t been the case with poor Donny. At eighteen, though, I seemed to feel things for an awful lot of guys, and I couldn’t tell which feelings mattered and which didn’t. Everybody was attractive! I wondered if there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was oversexed? I was crazy a
bout some girls too. It was common at Andrews for girls to get together with each other. It had cachet—a girl could be a lesbian one year and straight the next. It wasn’t as acceptable for boys. My fickle heart sent me roaming, never settling anywhere for long.
Toward the end of the spring term, Dad called and said he’d come and get me and lug me and my stuff to Cambridge. That was so thoughtful, so unusual for him, that I felt almost teary, but I just said casually, “Sure, okay.” We set a day and time, and there he was, bright and early on a Friday at the end of May. He had his truck, which held all my stuff easily. It was amazing how much stuff I had—almost twice as much as I’d come up with. I didn’t think I’d bought much over the year, some books, a couple of lipsticks, that’s all, I thought, but I’d gotten a new stereo for Christmas and a lot of clothes and books, tons of books. He packed all the stuff up and I got in the cab with him and we drove off. After we’d been on the road for what seemed like ages, I was pretty hungry, but he was driving with grim intensity and I didn’t dare to suggest stopping. Finally, as we approached Marlboro, he pulled into the driveway of a little restaurant. “Want some lunch?”
“Yeah!” I said fervently.
We got out. Dad stretched and we went in. They knew him in this place. He liked to be known and greeted; it put him in a good mood. That put me in a good mood. We both had huge hamburgers topped with sliced raw onion on a delicious bun. I had a cola and Dad had two Manhattans. That worried me, but he did have coffee after lunch. Still, I was leery of driving with him, but he drove calmly as we left, seeming not to be in a hurry. He pulled into a place—it looked like a car dealership—and I wondered if he was having trouble with the truck.
“Out,” he ordered. I shrugged and obeyed. We walked into the dealer’s office.
“Mr. Leighton!” a booming voice welcomed him.
The Love Children Page 12