The front door opened. Bobbie came in. “Julie Robertson, Bobbie Feyerlicht.” A little instant laughter between the women. C.C. suddenly saw Bobbie through Julie’s eyes, a strong woman of middle height in a black turtleneck, black miniskirt, good legs, black lace-ups, black hair cut short, a face that allowed no nonsense. Was Bobbie attractive to men? He figured Julie would think so. He guessed a woman could still be attractive at thirty-two.
Charlie came back, he took Julie home, C.C. along for the ride. A gentle kiss at the door. Next weekend they would do something together. She had to talk to Stanley this week.
But during the week Stanley didn’t want to talk to Julie, and Friday he was gone.
Julie and C.C. dated quietly for a couple of months, they got to know each other. They gave up their virginity to each other on New Year’s Eve. For the next year and a half they were inseparable. Each made the other a stronger person, a finer person. Then graduation, almost invisible when they met, suddenly loomed as the moment of divide. C.C. had been lured to Columbia College and the big city. He made Julie apply to Barnard where she didn’t want to go, not really. Her choice was Middlebury, small town, the hills of Vermont. He couldn’t see himself being at college in the middle of all that snow, those trees; Median was small enough. But he said he’d apply. And then he didn’t. Columbia wanted C.C., Barnard College didn’t have a place for Julie. He told her Middlebury had turned him down, a lie it hurt to speak.
The day before the evening of their graduation dance, Bobbie insisted C.C. bring Julie by the house. C.C. filling his dinner jacket in the chest and upper arms, Julie in her off-one-shoulder long white gown transformed from pretty girl to gorgeous young woman, they were lovely together. Once again Bobbie was moved by them, knowing they’d soon leave each other behind.
It wasn’t so bad, they figured. They’d have the summer, then despite being miles apart there’d be long weekends in New York and Vermont together in October and November, and Thanksgiving in Median, soon it’d be Christmas vacation. And they’d always have the telephone, and mail. Their love was too great to let mere distance keep them apart.
September was filled with letters and phone calls. Fewer letters in October and she couldn’t come to New York for the long weekend, a major exam the following Wednesday and she had to study. He insisted on driving up to Middlebury at the beginning of November, she begging him not to, they’d see each other soon, Thanksgiving was just a couple of weeks away. He agreed, but agonized. Had she fallen out of love with him? Worse, had she met someone else? How could she have? They knew they loved each other.
Over Thanksgiving she told him yes, she was dating Gary, a nice guy.
“But why? We know we love each other, don’t we?”
“I loved you, I really did,” she told him.
“Then why? Why? Why? Don’t you want to be together, like we’d planned?”
“Listen to me, C.C. I wanted to be together, you didn’t. Right?”
“Julie? Of course I do, how can you—?”
“You didn’t want to be with me, C.C.”
“How can you say that?”
“We could’ve been together at Middlebury.”
“Julie, we couldn’t, they didn’t accept me—”
“You didn’t give them the chance, did you? Did you?”
“Oh god, Julie—”
Julie had wondered why they had turned him down. If he was accepted at Columbia with their standards, surely he could get into Middlebury. She had to find out. In October she drew up her courage and went to the Admissions Office. No, the student in question had never applied. “You didn’t want to be with me, C.C. Deep down you didn’t want that.”
He argued, he ached from loving her, nothing had changed, he’d transfer.
“Too late, C.C.”
•
Lola stared down over the edge, silent for a while. She shook her head. “Kinda sad.”
I glanced at her. She’d spoken the words with inflections pretty close to what I’d heard in Julie’s voice.
“But he really loved her.”
I shrugged.
“Is that how the young were, in the sixties?”
“Lots of freedom. Of all sorts. But I don’t really know, not first-hand. I wasn’t around, remember? I died years earlier.”
“I wonder what I was like at their age …”
“You must have been very beautiful.”
“Not what I mean. Did they get back together?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“How can you just break off like that—”
“Lola. You need to know about other things that were happening.”
“Exciting stuff?”
“You’ll see.”
•
2. (1968)
The bond between Johnnie’s mother and father had been a feeble thing for years. Even when he was a child the lack of respect they showed each other had hurt him hard. He remembered a morning, a breakfast table, his father staring at his cup. “The coffee’s cold.”
“You want me to warm it up?” She reached for it—
“Leave it!” He pulled it toward him, too quickly, and coffee splashed onto his trousers. “Damn it, Beth, you’re impossible.”
Johnnie thought, He spilled that coffee, not she. And a good thing it wasn’t hot anymore.
She brought his father a towel.
“No no no, I have to get these pants off. I don’t know what it is with you, too damn smart for your own good, can’t even serve me hot coffee.”
“I think— It was hot when I brought it.”
“You think. Like in your lab? Those idiot experiments? God, Beth.” He left the room.
What, Johnnie wondered, did his mother’s lab have to do with the coffee?
A very few years more and she stopped responding to his father. Johnnie remembered another morning, he sitting on a stair, reading before school. His mother, bulging briefcase in hand, about to leave the house. His father, stopping her at the door, “You’re not driving.”
She pushed him away. He caught her by the arm.
“Beth, you will not drive that car. Not in your condition.”
“What condition? What goddamn condition!”
He let go of her, grabbed her briefcase, unclasped it, reached in, pulled out a bottle that looked nearly full. “This condition.”
She snatched it back. “It’s none of your business.” She shoved it into the case again. “And I’m driving.” She glared at him.
“Okay,” he said. “Drive. Kill yourself. Just don’t take anybody with you.”
She slammed the door.
Johnnie wished, so much, she wouldn’t do this. Had she been drinking since she woke up? His father called it her bottled escape. Soon after, in the middle of the academic year, Johnnie was sent to boarding school.
Even in those days Beth still insisted that her work came first, second, third. She fought for her time. And she drank to leave Johnnie’s father behind, as he had left her. When she came to visit Johnnie at school, at those times she wouldn’t be drinking. Or only a little. One day, as they walked along the stream at the edge of the campus grounds, he forced himself to ask, “Why are you and Father so angry with each other?”
“Oh dear,” she said.
He waited. They walked.
“How can I say this, Johnnie?” She stopped, and leaned against a tree.
He folded his arms and watched her. Her face had many hard lines now. On her cheeks and by her eyes, on her temples.
“I think, in a shared life you’ve got to be able to have—if not love, at least respect.”
“You and Father don’t respect each other, do you?”
She shook her head. “Respect when it’s regularly denied can’t ever be reclaimed.”
The absolute sense of not ever seared into Johnnie’s brain. Everything she said he found complicated, painfully so. Others saw his father as an important man, a wise man, a man who dined at the White House with the preside
nt, who received national and international awards, who owned a sixty-four-foot yacht he rarely sailed and had taken Johnnie on only once.
He was told years later that the happiest day in his mother’s life had come not on winning the Philipis Prize at age twenty-three nor the Marcus Attenborough Award for Achievement in Biology, the most yearned-for accolade by scientists under thirty-five, but at being told her husband’s mistress had overdosed and was dead.
Only twice during his boarding school time did his father visit. The first time, the annual and compulsory meeting with parents, Joe Cochan substituting for Beth, unavailable, her first hospitalization. Joe and John spoke little. The second, in John’s last year of school, on a sunny spring afternoon, they drove to a pond north of the school, to walk, for some warm air, perhaps to talk. There was little conversation. Even when John asked, “Will Mother ever get better?”
Joe shook his head, as much a statement of not knowing as a no.
“Father? What really is wrong with her? I mean, why does she drink?”
Again that shake of Joe’s head. “I can only say, her work. Her failure in her work.”
When John was younger he’d assumed the cell-transforming compounds she’d long experimented with had attacked her mind. In a recurring nightmare the chemicals appeared as thin brimstone fumes breathed out by giant spiders, fumes that befouled the atmosphere in his mother’s laboratory. In another the chemicals were tiny lines of gasses carried by bright red earwigs hiding in his mother’s hair while she worked, and as she slept in her bed they crawled into her ear and excreted their gasses directly into his mother’s brain. Often he woke screaming.
•
“I’m glad I don’t remember things,” said Lola. “I’m glad my brain isn’t full of memories.”
I nodded. “But not everything back then is horrible.”
“Yeah, I know. And you’re going to prove it to me.”
Her voice had taken on a new irked tone. And I thought Gods were supposed to bask in ongoing pleasure. Ha! I figured I’d better say something about that. “If you want, I can quit. It’s your story. You can tell me to stop.”
She looked at me, her forehead furrowed. “Stop? Why?”
“I think maybe I’m upsetting you.”
“No. Don’t stop.”
“You sure?”
She slid over closer to me. “Course I’m sure. If you don’t go on, I’ll never find out what happened, what’s gonna happen to them all.” She lay her hand on my arm. “Please.”
A god with a paradoxical nature. I decided I was liking it a lot more than finding it off-putting. I stared down over the edge of cloud and searched. This looking back business, trying to find their memories, wasn’t that simple. Snatches of memories, wisps. But no story. I shook my head. I made myself come closer in time. Okay: there, and maybe there.
“What?”
“I can’t find any memories of note till six years later. 1974.”
She smiled, an eager glance now taking her face. “Good. Who?”
•
3. (1974)
C.C. had nowhere he could call home. His apartment wasn’t a home. Now with Thea gone, it could never become one.
He tossed the gym bag onto the back seat of the old Dodge, got in behind the wheel, and willed the car to start. He turned the key, a wheeze, couple of grunts, and the motor did turn over. He stared absently through the windshield, sort of at the hood, sort of at the occasional flakes of snow dropping heavily onto it. Parts of the engine down under the hood were as rusted out as the bottom of the driver-side door but the old girl did run. Advantage of keeping a heap like this in the city, nobody’s tempted to steal it. Its hubcaps had disappeared a long time ago.
He gave the engine a minute to warm up. In the side mirror he saw blue smoke belching out the tailpipe. Hey, this was New York, that’s what cars did in New York. The clock on the dash said 8:19. Late. Thea’s early morning announcement had kept him up from half past three on, no way now to beat the rush hour traffic. True, he’d be heading out of the city. Except in the city there’s traffic everywhere, always, no escape.
Goddamn Thea. Goddamn snow. More than two hundred goddamn miles to Boston. With a speedy car, dry roads, no problem. But since his presence there would be a surprise, if he didn’t make it, Bobbie would never know he tried. But damn, the whole event was a big deal for Bobbie. Even if she scoffed at it. Ricardo had told C.C. she was downplaying it but both of them—the three of them—knew: a top-notch achievement.
He’d had enough coffee, he wouldn’t fall asleep. How could Thea have blasted him like that? In the middle of the night? Oh, he knew how, and why. Because Thea was a bitch, a manipulator. And very sexy. Could be any of those, separately or in various combos, at will.
By getting out of the dorms in the fall, taking the apartment on 115th Street, he thought he’d set himself up a home of a kind. The royalties from his father’s books even now covered the rent. In that sense it was his home. Then Thea moved in. Okay, he’d invited her, did she want to share his apartment, his life, and of course she said nothing would please her more and then went about not sharing but bending the place into her shape, her style, her mood. Thea was impressive, he admitted this. But to have dumped all her shit on him five hours ago just before he had to leave— Except that was pure Thea.
He’d sold the house in Median, he and Bobbie, early in the summer after his first year at Columbia. He helped fix it up to raise the asking price. Bobbie handled the sale. Gramma had died blessedly quickly, as her friends repeated, after the liver cancer diagnosis the winter before, seven weeks from finding out to the funeral. It could have been there for years, her doctor said, no one knew, no pain until close to the end. Then the morphine, and the second day of C.C. home for spring break she slid away. At least he’d had the chance to see her that one more time. C.C. and Bobbie had mourned with each other, Bobbie actually going to the synagogue because she knew her mother would have been pleased, or at least relieved. Rabbi Grossman delivered a fine eulogy for Barbara Feyerlicht. Even C.C. thought so.
Julie, also home, had come by the house to offer condolences. She was more beautiful than he’d ever seen her but she stayed only a few minutes, talking mainly with Bobbie. At the funeral she sat with Bobbie and him. She’d never been to a synagogue before. He appreciated her deciding to be at his side. First step in coming together again? After the service he asked her if he could visit her at her parents’ house, they could talk, figure where each of them— No, she interrupted him, not a good idea, they each had become different people, let’s leave it at that. He tried to argue, to explain, to apologize. No, no reprieve. She left. He watched her go. It hurt too much to look away.
Bobbie had tried to make her apartment in Somerville into a home for C.C. He appreciated this. But it could never become more than a base, a resting place at best. She gave him a room where he could leave his things—books, memory bits and pieces from Gramma’s house, seasonal clothes—but it remained for him an abstract place.
The summer after his first year he found a Parks and Playgrounds job in Cambridge, and a pizza delivery job in Boston, and slept in the Somerville apartment; usually, anyway. Most of his non-work time was given over to the anti-Vietnam War movement, to participating in the battle against Nixon’s version of American madness. His second summer his friend, friend only, Julie suggested they go west together, plant trees in British Columbia, good money in that. And maybe, maybe, out there in the wilderness— In the end Julie didn’t go, though C.C. had committed himself. It was an inordinately dry summer. Instead of planting trees he ended up saving trees, fighting forest fires, reducing disasters, sweating soot off face and arms. The spring of his third year he decided to cancel school for a while. He gave his time in the struggle to defeat Nixon, whatever that took. For fifteen months he worked with a series of organizations devoted to the cause. Met some decent conservatives, and some smart radicals. Including Thea.
He stepped on the clutch, sl
ipped into first gear, engaged, turned the wheel hard, pulled around the car in front, and headed west, then north. Checked out the Drive entry. Decided no, it looked crowded as usual. He’d stay on city streets a while longer. He wasn’t a New Yorker yet, figured he’d likely never be, but he had learned some of the traffic patterns. Which was all he needed, only this last semester to finish, double major in geography and government, then he was gone. To where, he didn’t know. Not likely a city. The time he’d enjoyed most was the summer out west, living in a tent colony for the short time he planted firs and cedar, then just sleeping on the ground, little spurts of rest in lulls as the forest burned.
No, Bobbie’s apartment wasn’t a home for him. But it had become Bobbie’s home. And increasingly Ricardo’s. Ricardo was good for Bobbie. The second best thing that ever happened to her, she said. The first? Getting to be big sister to C.C. Who hoped she stressed it the other way around to Ricardo; C.C. liked Ricardo, a lot. In truth, Bobbie made it clear, the apartment was her first real home. She’d lived with Gramma in the Median house where she’d grown up but after her nine months in San Francisco—a rented room, kitchenette, tiny bathroom—her mother’s home never became a home for her, couldn’t have.
Why did she live in her mother’s house? When C.C. had first asked her she’d said, “Because it’s free. I can do whatever I want here in Median. I don’t have to worry about a roof over my head. A part-time job and I can pay more than my share of food and heat and help Gramma with insurance and taxes. And I can write my poetry.”
Later when he asked she said, “So I can raise you in a small town, keep you out of trouble. Spend time with you. Watch you grow up. And that’s kinda neat.”
Around the time he began dating Julie he discovered a third reason, saw it in the past over his shoulder, and was relieved he’d not recognized it back then. When he was eleven-twelve-thirteen, more often than he’d liked, she’d go away, overnight, a weekend, sometimes a week or two. Gramma looked after him then. Sometimes spoiled him. But Gramma wasn’t Bobbie. Bobbie took complete interest in whatever he thought, needed, did. Which was great then, a bit embarrassing now. Because he never took the same complete interest in Bobbie, what she wanted, what happened in her life beyond him, beyond the house. She went away. He might have asked her a few times where she’d gone but had no real interest in any details, just glad she’d come back. Only much later did he understand she had to have a real piece of life to herself. And as far as he knew Gramma had never asked Bobbie where she’d been, what she’d done. That seemed okay between the two of them. So there’d never been a reason for him to ask.
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