The Love Children

by Marylin French

  “If you’ll have me.”

  “We will! At least for a time. I can’t promise permanent membership—we have to have room, and we have to vote on you. But you can stay with us temporarily. We take any woman in need. And you certainly sound in need.” She turned to Marty. “Sexual harassment, right?”

  What was sexual harassment?

  “Yes,” Marty said, grimacing.

  “Oh,” Sandy said falteringly and I thought she was going to cry. “I’m so tired. It’s been so exhausting. I hoped I could settle somewhere for good. Is there someplace else I can go?”

  She was a different person, I thought, since her father died. As if she had all these years been standing on a platform called Daddy, and it had suddenly splintered under her feet, and she was flailing in the air, falling. Where was my calm, confident, dignified, cool-headed friend?

  “Don’t fret,” Laura said in a motherly way. “You can settle with us for a while and if we don’t take you permanently we’ll find someplace else for you. When did you want to join us?”

  Sandy gave a tiny smile of relief. “Really? Oh! Oh, as soon as I can! I’m living at Pax, a commune near Becket. I went up there with Jess”—Sandy nodded her head in my direction—“on New Year’s Day. I have to go back there today to settle up. Otherwise I’d just stay here. I can’t wait to get out of there. But I put in three thousand dollars to join, and I have to at least try to get something back. Will I need to put money in here?”

  “No. This is not a formal commune. A professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke owns the house—Annette Collier—she has a private practice here, in the annex. It’s toward the back. A little two-story cottage attached to the main house. It was originally built as a dower house, for the mother-in-law, you know? Annette pays the upkeep on the house. The main house has eight bedrooms, and right now six women live here. We’re self-governing, except that Annette decides about repairs and any changes in the structure of the house. We have chores, there’s a schedule, we make it up ourselves, and we each pay something every month toward the upkeep and our food. It’s not a lot. She’s not in this to make a profit; she wants to help women. If you get a job, you should be able to cover it. We never ask for lump sums. When we need to make repairs or redecorate, we use the emergency fund. Our monthly maintenance fee includes a few dollars for the emergency fund. But people who come here for shelter, like you, don’t have to pay anything. After a week, we ask you to contribute to the food kitty, but that’s all. If you can get some money back from Pax, good for you. But the chances are you won’t. Especially if it’s run by the guys who are harassing you. And you don’t need it to come here.”

  “God. Money’s all they talk about up there,” Sandy said. When she said that, I realized it was true. But I had been used to hearing my parents talk about money problems in the years before my father got famous, and it had never bothered me. Sandy’s family probably never talked about money. “It’s constant.” She laughed.

  I felt that that wasn’t entirely fair. Aside from politics, everything we talked about was mundane, because we worried about things that were broken or dirty, that needed attention. We worried about them because we could not afford to replace them, so talking about them was sensible, practical. We talked about what we would eat, when we would do the next baking, if the plumbing needed attention (as it regularly did with only one toilet and bathtub), how the horses were doing, the chickens, the land itself, and our bills, especially the one at the supermarket. But that was one of the things I liked about Pax: everything was practical, real. There was no time for fancifulness, daydreams, pretensions. No time for egos, preening, or psychology. Nothing superficial.

  Sandy and Laura made their arrangements, then we drove back to Marty’s place and picked up our car and I drove us back home. I was a little worried about how the group was going to react to hearing that I had helped Sandy plan her escape, and I was tense at dinner that night, when Sandy told them she was going to leave. They were stunned. At first no one said anything.

  “Really?” Bernice said finally. She tried hard not to smile, but her mouth trembled. And I thought she liked Sandy!

  “So soon?” Rebecca asked in dismay. “You just got here!” She looked hurt.

  “Yes.” Sandy set her mouth. “I’ve had problems here. I’m a lesbian,” she said to the women, avoiding Brad, “and I’d be happier living without male harassment.” There was no kindness in her voice.

  Instantly, the rest of them turned to me. I kept my face impassive.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Lysanne protested.

  “I was sure the guy harassing me would just get worse,” Sandy said bitterly, not looking at Brad.

  Brad glared at her. He stood up suddenly and thrust his chair back so hard it hit the wall. “Do as you damned well please. Who cares!” he growled.

  “Brad!” Rebecca cried. She turned to Sandy. “Sandy, I’m so sorry. Have we been insensitive to you?”

  “You haven’t,” Sandy said. “Some people have.”

  No one moved. They all must have known, seen it going on. All but stupid me.

  “We’re sorry, Sandy,” Lysanne said.

  Stepan looked hard at me. “You going too?”

  “I’d rather stay,” I said. Would they let me?

  “Of course you’ll stay,” Bishop exploded. “Sandy too. Nobody will give you a hard time from now on, Sandy-andy! Anybody comes on to you, I’ll beat ’em up for you, I’ll take care of you!” That was the old Bishop. That Bishop always made us laugh. He did this time too—almost.

  Sandy smiled at him. “Thanks, Bish. But I’ve made up my mind. I would like to get some of my three thousand dollars out, if I could.”

  “How? How?” Brad came charging back into the room. He must have been standing on the other side of the doorway. “We’ve spent it! It’s in the house. The new part of the foundation wall. The dehumidifier.”

  “Is anything left?”

  “We have a thousand in the bank.”

  “Give her that,” Bishop said authoritatively.

  “Eight hundred, actually,” Rebecca said. “Plus change.”

  “Give it to her!”

  “It’ll break us! It’s all we have,” Brad argued.

  “Do it,” Bishop said in a low voice I had never heard before.

  “Thanks, Bish,” Sandy said, “but I don’t want to leave you flat broke. Give me five hundred and a note for fifteen hundred against when the house is sold. A thousand should cover my share of rent for the four months I’ve been here.”

  “Is May,” Stepan argued. “You come New Year.”

  “Four-plus months,” Sandy amended, gazing coldly at Stepan. So it was agreed.

  Sandy left the next day, Monday. I had to work at the market all day, so Bishop drove her to Pittsfield in the truck. She took a bus for Boston. She would get a cab from the bus terminal to Belmont, stay a couple of nights at her mother’s house, pick up her car, and drive out to Northampton. She felt no guilt about that, she said: her mother could afford to buy Naomi a car of her own. But I lay awake late that night, my cheeks wet, feeling more alone than I knew I should feel, and more alone than I have ever felt since.

  I stayed at Pax. I had become a farmer.

  When we planned our spring planting, I urged that we use untreated seeds, and fertilize our crops only with compost. Stepan kept the compost heap, filled with our food waste and ashes. We also had a mulch pile, made up of our hay and choppings of the hairy vetch that grew down near our pond. Because I provided an extra hand, we were able to expand our planting area, and we put in corn, green beans, peas, zucchini, beets, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, turnips, potatoes, and soy. We used natural pest controls and watered with hoses—quite a chore! But after I tasted our spinach and sugar snap peas that summer, I was converted to the natural method forever.

  With three of us working, we had enough yield to sell some. Bishop and Brad slapped some boards together and built a farm stand out front facing th
e road, and we made almost two thousand dollars that fall, selling corn, tomatoes, spinach, green beans, and herbs, as well as apples from our orchard. For the first time in Pax’s existence, we were able to pay off our bill at the market, which gained us respect in the community. We were no longer dirty, long-haired hippies, but upstanding members of society who paid their debts.

  I did a lot of cooking during the years I lived at Pax. I scorched dinners and skillets, I boiled soup away to a brown scum in the bottom of a huge pot, I overcooked and undercooked, overspiced and underspiced, and I learned. I can’t say my cooking was great; our ingredients were too limited for that. But we had delectable fresh vegetables, and our eggs, always fresh and always fertilized, were scrumptious and plentiful. My vegetable omelets, soufflés, and scrambled eggs with herbs and potatoes were delicious; my soups were as good as soup can be when made without stock, which I did not often have. A couple of times a year on a special occasion, I would ask Bernice to kill a couple of chickens for dinner. She didn’t mind doing it; she grabbed a chicken as if it were her former lover Gregory and wielded the ax with pleasure. Sometime that spring she had fallen out of love and into hate with Gregory; and whatever else Bernice was, she was steadfast in her feelings. Whenever we had chicken, I saved every bone and made a broth, and we’d have luscious soup based on it—for two nights at least.

  Soon everyone in the house wanted me to cook every night because my cooking tasted better than anyone else’s. And I wanted to do it, except when I was just too tired after planting or weeding all day. Then Bishop or Rebecca or Bernice would do it. That everyone groaned when I wasn’t the cook gave me confidence, though I often enough found fault with my own cooking.

  A few nights after Sandy left, Stepan came to my room, asking permission to enter. He was stiff and formal, sitting on the straight chair that functioned as my desk chair. I sat on the bed—there were no other chairs. He had his hands clasped between his legs, and he bent forward like a petitioner, which I suspected he was. We both lit cigarettes, which at Pax were a luxury rather than a habit.

  He said he’d been wanting to get to know me since I’d arrived, but because he hadn’t been sure about my relationship with Sandy, he hadn’t wanted to intrude. I didn’t believe this. I didn’t think any of the guys had any suspicion whatever that Sandy was gay, and once we asked for separate rooms, we were both fair game. But I did think that Sandy being automatically my ally intimidated him a little. Now that she was gone and I was alone, he felt stronger.

  I deduced this from his demeanor, and as I did, it dawned on me that I couldn’t have been coming on to Stepan the way Sandy had said. Wouldn’t he have noticed if I had? If he was interested in me, why didn’t he act sooner, if I was being so flirty?

  A terrible thought stopped me.

  Could it be that Sandy was jealous of my attraction to him? Maybe she didn’t want me to get involved with anyone, since she wasn’t. Like both of us were attracted to Bishop, but neither of us had acted on it . . .

  I didn’t like these thoughts. I hadn’t completely got over Sandy’s attack on me. I knew she was sorry for it, but that didn’t mean she didn’t mean it. I couldn’t bear to think about what it meant. My friendship with Sandy had been the one perfect thing in my life, the one relationship that had no subversive currents. It had proved to me that a beautiful friendship was possible. I would prefer to think that I was a flirty tease than to think that Sandy harbored animus against me. But whatever had happened to Sarah?

  I couldn’t think about this.

  Anyway, I was happy to get involved with Stepan; he was sexy and warmhearted. His sullenness was that of a child whose parents don’t listen to him; it made me feel tender toward him, as I would toward a small child. And maybe because he’d first heard about me from Bishop, he treated me with respect.

  During the past months, without anyone to talk to intimately, without Mom or Steve, or even Sandy or Bishop, really, since the days of our intimacy seemed to be past, I had done some thinking about a number of things. I’d come to the conclusion that Christopher and the other guys I’d been involved with at Andrews didn’t treat me with respect. Once they’d slept with me, they treated me in an offhand way. I didn’t complain about it but it made me uncomfortable; it felt as if I had sunk in their regard. For example, Christopher’s simply refusing to listen to my poetry, which, now that I thought about it, was probably as good as his. Steve had respected me, and Bishop, but I hadn’t slept with them. I think I had just assumed that that was how boys treated girls they were sleeping with—that intimacy involved feeling so easy with the girl that a boy could talk to her as though she was his maid.

  Another thing I realized was that people who are much younger than you are can be, oh, a little trying sometimes. A kid who worked with me at the supermarket, Tarak, was fifteen and beautiful—dark eyes and hair, pale skin—and had a crush on me. He was at me constantly, and I liked him, he was cute and funny, but he laughed at odd things, giggled, and he didn’t understand when the manager, Sheila, felt blue. She’d been jilted by a guy she’d loved. Tarak just thought she was funny. Sometimes he got on my nerves. I’m not saying Philo was anything like him, but it made me think that maybe Mom might have had a reason to leave him. Since I’d been holding that against Mom ever since, in a hard place in my heart, it was a relief to understand that she might not have been acting like a witch.

  These realizations made it easier for me to get together with Stepan that night. We pretty much stayed together after that. Cynthia didn’t seem to care at all; Stepan had said she wouldn’t. She moved into a spare room, but I kept my room. I went into Stepan’s once in a while; once in a while he came into mine. But we stayed separate.

  That summer, I found out why Cynthia was the way she was. She and Stepan slept together sometimes, but for both of them, it was for comfort. They had never been in love with each other and had drifted together out of loneliness. Cynthia was actually in love with an unsuitable man she thought was unattainable, the father of one of her students. For months, they’d been eyeing each other. They then must have spoken, because over the summer, the door to the tack room—which had a couch—was sometimes closed and seemed to be locked and Mr. Howard’s car would be in the driveway.

  Stepan and I got along in a calm, sweet way. Both of us were mainly concerned with the farm, but we had desire for each other. My life settled into steady contented rhythms for the first time. I was almost twenty-one and thought I’d found the secret of a happy life.

  13

  Soon after Sandy left, a new guy arrived, Bert Stern, who had gone to high school with Hal Shaw, a cousin of Brad’s from Alturas, in northern California. Raised in a strongly patriotic family, he’d enlisted in the army in 1969 and been sent to Vietnam. Hal wrote Brad that Bert had seen and suffered terrible things. Hal didn’t know the details; he only knew that Bert’s best friend, who had been in the same squad, had been wounded, treated, sent back to combat, and finally killed, along with everybody else in the squad. Bert never talked about Vietnam. He’d been wounded, how, we didn’t know, but badly enough to be discharged. That wound apparently is what saved his life; the others he had fought with died in an action that occurred after he was airlifted to Tokyo. After the war, he couldn’t seem to find anything he wanted to do; he just hung around Alturas, rummaging for drugs and lounging at bars and getting into fights. Hal told him about Brad and the commune, and he hitched across the country on the off chance that he’d be able to tolerate living with us.

  Bert challenged all my prejudices. The minute I heard his history, I felt a certain contempt creeping up my spine. Then I realized that I was automatically adopting the attitude of my high school crowd, which was unfair and adolescent. I decided to keep an open mind, and when I studied his face and body, when he sat with us, saying he’d like to join Pax, I felt a wave of pity wash over me. He was three or four years older than I was, but he looked ten years older. And his face—there was something destroyed in it. The ey
es, so cold, so carefully inexpressive, and the mouth, hard and set and bitter, but verging on a sob. He’d been in the midst of horror, had seen killing and maybe had killed himself. I found myself regarding him with great respect. He was a person who had suffered and survived; that gave him stature. I would not have admitted it, but he was a hero in my eyes.

  He wasn’t like anybody else I knew. Just the way he stood, with his stiff posture, and the expression in his eyes, marked him as different. He looked not just wary, but downright suspicious; his demeanor was hostile. I told myself—and I imagine the others did too—that this was a defensive posture that would ease up in time. He spoke between clenched teeth, and in low tones, so we all had to lean forward and try to read his lips to understand him. But he spoke so rarely that it did not become a problem.

  Bert told us he was tired and needed to rest. He looked and sounded tired. His eyes were tired. But this didn’t matter to the guys: when Brad and Stepan heard that he had experience with plumbing and electricity, they could have hugged him. Thrilled to have him join us, they carefully refrained from mentioning the virulent antiwar stance Pax had maintained for years. And the women, especially Bernice and Lysanne, took one look at him and were ready to open their arms and expose their breasts. He brought out the maternal in them; they too saw the hurt in him. I decided I didn’t have any maternal side, because that’s not how I felt; I just approached him very delicately, like somebody who could be broken easily.

  So there was no argument when we voted on accepting him, although I could see that Bishop and Rebecca were not enthusiastic. I think that they felt that something was off about Bert, something that would make it hard for him to blend in—and that was our criterion, after all. I felt that too, but I thought that his being an injured man and a victim of war should override our doubts. When Cynthia suggested that accepting him was going back on our position against the war, I argued that, however opposed to war we were, we shouldn’t blame the poor guys who’d been forced to fight it. Everybody agreed. In truth, now that the war was over, we rarely talked about it anymore.