The Love Children

by Marylin French

  Bert was more than tired; he was sick. He smoked cigarettes, as we all did, and pot, as we all did, but it seemed to me that he was constantly high on pot, and horribly edgy on the rare occasions when he wasn’t. I didn’t know how he could afford so much pot or where he got it. I wasn’t sure what happened to your health when you took so much. But when the guys teased him about his sources, he would not be baited, and he had enough money to do as he liked. He bought his way in for three thousand dollars, twenty-two hundred of which Bishop forced Brad to send to Sandy—he felt she’d been taken by us. Bert always had pocket money and didn’t need an outside job. I figured he got compensation from the government every month—which was only right, except I never discovered how he had been wounded. And he got his mail at a PO box, so I couldn’t spy on him.

  Bert should never have joined a commune, but that wasn’t evident immediately. His rigidity, his stubbornness, and his need to dominate caused general bad feelings, a new experience at Pax. Before he arrived, people who had personal differences settled things by compromise; they made up because they wanted to get along, so the general tone was always harmonious. Why else join a commune? When someone got on my nerves, I reminded myself of what Mom would say about her friends’ quirks: try to imagine what their days are like. If you imagine being another person, you quickly understand why they do most things they do. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine being Bert; I couldn’t fathom what could be going on in his mind. His expression scared me a little, when a cold hardness settled on his unshaven face, especially if it seemed directed at me. He almost never smiled and I never heard him laugh. He did more than his share of work, however, and with dogged thoroughness. And he impressed the guys, especially Brad, by being utterly self-contained. He rarely spoke to any of the women and rarely looked directly at anyone.

  Brad, who was usually pretty cool except to Bishop, accepted Bert instantly. He didn’t make overtures toward him, but offered silent, nodding agreement to anything Bert said. When Bert was engaged in a project, Brad always silently appeared to help, and when he needed help himself, he would glance over at Bert. If Bert nodded, so did Brad. They had a tacit concord. The rest of us, sensing this, warmed toward Bert. But he did not return our warmth.

  Bishop had loved Brad from the first time he had met him in Nevada, and he still admired him. L’affaire Sandy had dented his regard for Brad a bit, but Bishop and Brad still worked together, and their friendship was continually reaffirmed. Bishop was impressed by Brad’s knowledge of horses and tools, his expertise in what Bishop thought of as manly arts, and Brad’s knowing big-brotherliness toward Bishop. But Brad treated the women at Pax—even Bernice, his lover—with some disdain. I sensed that Bishop was aware of this and didn’t like it; he adored Rebecca and Sandy and me; he admired us, thought we were smart and deserving of respect. Maybe Rebecca had been offended by Brad’s attitude and had said something and, in any case, I assumed that on their drive to Pittsfield Sandy had told Bishop how Brad had harassed her. And Bishop had to be upset that Brad had essentially driven one of his best friends out of Pax. But he showed nothing. This made me wonder: was Bishop a wimp? Or was he pulling away from Brad in small ways I could not see but that Brad felt? I think that was the case and that it made Brad even more open to Bert when he arrived—he needed a new ally. It was hard to know, because one thing happened on the heels of another. Sandy left in early May and Bert arrived in June, by which time Bishop was deeply involved in plans that affected all of us at Pax.

  Not until supper one night in July 1973 did Bishop tell us his plans. He said, in his unpretentious way, that he had something to tell us. He had waited, he said, until the seeds were in—the biggest chore; the herb garden and vegetables were planted, and we were all relaxed. I was easy, happy. I’d got some free milk from the market (Sheila gave it to me because it was about to pass its sell-by date—she knew how hard things were for us and often did that), so I’d been able to make tapioca pudding for dessert. We ate it with the intense concentration we gave delicious food—always a treat for us—and we were sitting smoking afterward in the quiet that attends deep satisfaction.

  Bishop glanced at Rebecca, who smiled encouragingly at him, and dread rose in my heart. They were leaving. I knew it.

  Bishop began tentatively. “Uh, well, Bec and I, well, you all know how much we love you, and we love Pax, and the farm and the horses . . . But . . . maybe you feel the same way, there’s this little nagging thing, this part of us that hurts and we’ve been discussing it for a while now . . .”

  How long?

  “And we started to think it might represent a part of us that isn’t getting used. Like maybe our brains.”

  At this, everyone howled with laughter. We knew we all tended to veg out. People commented to each other, made jokes.

  “Anyway, what we’ve decided is we need to go back to school.”

  Everybody else took this with calm understanding, but I knew the problem wasn’t a simple matter of brain rot that could be solved by some Band-Aid solution. I sat, fists tight in my lap, lips pursed, pretending to smile.

  They had both applied to UMass in Amherst and been accepted as part-time students.

  “Hey!” people cried. “Congratulations!”

  Fat chance, I thought. UMass is not a part-time place. It’s too far away.

  Bishop darted a look at Rebecca, who picked up the narrative. “We plan to commute. We’ll leave every Monday after chores, around three or four, and spend Tuesday through Thursday there.

  “And the greatest luck!” she interrupted herself enthusiastically. “We found a commune down there that is willing to have us just a couple of nights a week! We’ll stay there Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, go to class Thursday, and then immediately drive back here. So we’ll be here Thursday night, and the whole weekend.

  “The commune down there will rent us a room for ten dollars a week, and we already have enough money saved up to pay for the year, plus expenses like books and stuff.”

  This was a stone dropped into my heart and, I think, all the hearts at the table. At that moment everyone saw how things would go. Everyone loved Bishop and Rebecca, who in some way were the core of Pax. We all knew how long the drive to Amherst was, how tiresome. I wasn’t the only one who suspected that this was the beginning of the end of Bish and Bec at the commune. We put the best face on it, acted cheerful that they were getting their lives in order. But, I suspect, many at the table were broken-hearted.

  I don’t know how Brad felt. Six months earlier, he would have been crushed if Bishop left; but now he was more buddy-buddy with Bert, siding with him in family conflicts. There was something different in the way the two of them heard this news from how the rest of us took it. Having an ally had softened Bert a little, made him a little less rigid and insistent on doing things his own way. Maybe the two of them felt a bit relieved that their new bond would not be strained by Bishop’s magnetism. Brad seemed to me to react with an edge of bitterness, as though he were a rejected lover. But maybe I was imagining it. Bert didn’t seem to care, one way or another. Both of them turned away with something cold in their hearts, while the rest of us congratulated our favorite members, inwardly grieving and sympathizing with each other at losing them.

  As for Bishop himself, I don’t know if he was upset about the Brad-Bert alliance, but I was willing to bet he was relieved. He and Rebecca were so close, so loving, they really had no room for anyone else. And of course he had me too; I would take Bishop’s side on any issue.

  Bishop and Rebecca worked especially hard that summer, as if to prove that their hearts were still with us. They carefully avoided discussing their college plans, until after supper on a Monday night at the end of August. Then they went around the table telling each of us how special we were, then said good-bye, having quietly packed the night before. They took Rebecca’s truck, leaving one less vehicle at the farm (that hurt), kissed us all, and promised to see us later in the week. We
all stood out in front of the house. Tears streamed down my cheeks and Bernice’s.

  Bishop was resuming college in his sophomore year, Rebecca in her junior year. They were taking what was considered three-quarter time and planned to do their library research in Amherst, so they would bring almost nothing of college back to Pax with them. They tried to arrive in time for supper on Thursday evening, after which they worked and talked only of Pax matters. Their ambition was hopeless, of course, but they were as discreet about their schooling as if it were a love affair.

  They both did well enough that UMass offered them full scholarships for the following year if they would attend full time. By then they had scouted the job market down there and found work. They could join the collective where they rented the room—of course the other commune had counted on that. They were such adorable people, everyone wanted them. They would have to leave Pax.

  Bernice, Cynthia, Lysanne, and I cried, and even Stepan had wet cheeks on the Saturday morning in August 1974 when Bish and Bec packed their gear into the truck and left us for the last time. We had lost our sanest member, Rebecca, and our sweetest, Bishop. But in April that year, a new woman had arrived, Lolly Hunt, a southerner with great charm and with some knowledge of farming—she’d lived on a farm in Alabama as a youngster. So we went on.

  During the year Bish and Bec were part time in Amherst, we finally had phone service installed. We needed it with them gone, to ask them things only they knew, like where the honing blade was and what medication to give the stallion when he was in a fit. Having a phone was great: Mom and I could now talk as well as write. I’d call and let the phone ring three times, then hang up. She’d know it was me and call back and we’d talk for an hour. I’d been writing her ten- and twelve-page letters since I’d arrived, but I missed hearing her voice. She drove up to see me the first summer I was away and stayed with us for a weekend; the next time she came she stayed at a motel in Great Barrington.

  In 1974, soon after Nixon resigned, Mom got involved with a new man, Moss Halley, a divorced lawyer who practiced in Cambridge and had an apartment there and who, she said, had great humor. I was glad she had someone in her life, but his presence unavoidably became another wedge separating us. I was forgetting Mom!

  I forgot Dad too. I hardly ever heard from him, although I wrote him every once in a while. He wrote me once, to tell me they were giving him a retrospective in New York, at the Guggenheim. That was a triumph for him and even Mom went to see it. Julie wrote me a sweet letter about nothing. Then, in 1975, I got a letter in which she apologized to me for leaving Dad, as if I would be angry with her for it. She said she had to leave because she couldn’t make him happy. Irene Templer, Mom’s friend from Vermont, told Mom that Julie had divorced him on the grounds of “abusive behavior.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. By now, sexual harassment and abusive behavior were terms frequently seen in the papers, popularized by the women’s liberation movement. But I didn’t know what they meant specifically. Did she mean that Dad had gone completely off his rocker and hit her? Or that he was just his old yelling self, exploding every night over some imagined betrayal? Or was it that he retreated into sullen silence for days at a time? Whatever, she’d already left him. She was in New York, where her sister lived, and was taking a course at Pratt. She was a lighthearted person, and I knew she’d be fine wherever she was. I meant to answer her, but somehow never got around to it.

  I lived so far outside the world that I had no interest in it. I was immersed in my plants and the people I lived with and I was completely satisfied, except for an occasional pang of guilt about selfishly cultivating my garden and ignoring my civic responsibilities, whatever they were. The only mirror at Pax was the small, cloudy one over the bathroom sink, and I rarely really looked at myself. But I felt that I radiated virtue. I believed that the commune was an innocent, pure world. Our virtue lay in our poverty, which was voluntary, and in our exercise of democracy in its truest form in our daily life. We were pure because we lived so austerely. My hands were calloused and red, I was sunburned all spring and summer (my face and neck and forearms at least), and maybe I looked older than I was, but I was utterly contented. I was living the life I had longed for when I was a little girl reading the Little House books. I remembered my satisfaction at helping to build a latrine one summer when I’d gone away to camp. Our life gave me that same joy. When you’re encompassed by necessity, you don’t suffer from ambiguity and doubt. They are luxurious diseases not caught by people who don’t have leisure. I didn’t miss them any more than I missed furs and jewels—which I’d never had or wanted.

  From the first, even before they definitively left, I knew that Bishop and Rebecca were doing the right thing. They were too smart to spend their lives at Pax. It was a waste of their intellects. So what about mine? I had continued to write poetry, but with increasing dissatisfaction: I felt I didn’t know enough to do it well. I decided to learn something about it.

  My time could not be spared in the spring and early summer, but I had plenty in the winter. I didn’t want to drive all the way to Amherst, so I signed up for a course in modern American poetry at a community college in Pittsfield, which was only about half an hour away. I went several times in the fall of 1974, but the class was poor. The level of teaching was too low, even for me. So in the spring semester I transferred to Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, a longer drive but not as far as Amherst.

  Simon’s Rock was designed for young students and I stuck out. But the teaching was better. We read Frost and Stevens and Williams and Moore and Lowell and Bishop. I decided that I would continue and study Yeats and Pound and Eliot. I took only one course at a time. Getting a degree was not important to me.

  Meanwhile, as time went on, the impact of Bishop and Rebecca’s departure became more evident. The mix had changed, and that seemed to change all the relationships. The two new people, Bert and Lolly, were so different from the people they replaced that we became a different community. Brad, who had the cachet of an original founder, and therefore maybe some more authority than the rest of us, had always been tempered by Bishop, softened by Bish’s sweetness. Bert had the opposite effect on Brad, bringing out all his hard angles. Bert’s silences were powerful; he didn’t speak, but he looked a lot—and how he looked was askance. It was as if he disapproved of everything, all the time. But when I studied his eyes, I saw a life I wouldn’t want to live; I saw a person who, when I thought of how he spent his days, I couldn’t imagine. It was as though he was in hell and I could see it but couldn’t reach him there, couldn’t help to pull him out.

  Bernice and Cynthia, who were rather dull, had been brightened by Rebecca’s intelligence and kept in balance by her sanity. Lolly had neither; she had been wandering for years, and soon after she arrived it became clear that what she was seeking was an attachment to a man. I wondered if I had been like her once—just like Sandy had suggested. But whereas a man meant to me a center for my affection, a home, men meant power, even survival, to Lolly. This was the single piece of wisdom she’d filtered out of whatever her past had been. I watched her in fascination. Without a man, she would drown; you could see this in her empty blue eyes, the desperation of her carmine mouth—even on the commune, she was never without her dark red lipstick. She didn’t attach herself to the women, but floated from one man to another. She tried Bishop first, but that was a waste of her time: he was impervious to flirtation, being as guileless as a three-year-old and utterly in love with Rebecca. So she tried Stepan, who was the most accessible of the others. He was flattered, wary, guilt-ridden, and afraid that I would explode. She played with him for a while, considering, but I gave her pretty strong competition, and besides, once she saw how the land lay at Pax, she moved to the hard men, who presumably had the power—whatever power she endowed them with in her mind. She didn’t approach them directly; she hovered, observing them. They knew it and were flattered, but too steeped in steely manhood to respond.

  I thought she
would end up with Bert eventually, but I lost interest in the drama in all the activity of my poetry course and the impending departure of Bishop and Rebecca. And nothing changed until after they left. Then Lolly, I noticed, started to do more than her share of kitchen duty, seeming to show up when either Bert or Brad was on the roster. At first I assumed they had switched with her; later I decided they paid her to do their work (they both hated kitchen duty). She was penniless when she joined us and Brad suggested she pay a little more into the kitty every week than other people in lieu of an investment. Brad and Bert always had more spending money than other people, I never knew exactly how. But if they were paying her, they were subverting the principle of a commune, and Bernice and Cynthia and I called a meeting to complain.

  Lysanne was (as always) apathetic, but the men said they had the right to do with their private money what they liked, that Lolly didn’t mind doing this work and they did, so they would no longer do kitchen duty and that was that.

  We were incredulous. “Brad!” Bernice protested, “You of all people to undermine commune principles! Everybody shares equally in work and reward, remember?”

  “Marx said it: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Brad intoned. “Critique of the Gotha Program , 1875. Kitchen work is not one of my abilities.”

  “And carpentry is not mine, but I do it!” Bernice exclaimed in fury.

  “We all do everything!” Cynthia yelled. “We always have! Now that Bishop’s gone you think you can ram things down our throats!”

  Brad sat back and folded his arms. “Like it or leave it.”

  Bert looked on with a small smile on his face—Bert, who never smiled. Then Bert the Silent spoke: “What difference does it make to you?” he sneered. “You’re not having to do extra work.”