A knock sounded on the door then: It was Arlyn with my book bag. In silence she extracted my physics book and held it out with both hands like an offering. Something in her face felt like warmth, and I was blinking back tears. Thank you, I thought but didn’t say. In a kind of trance, then, since with the Pledge in operation physics was moot, I opened the book. We were on electricity, defined as the flow of electrons. A set of problems was due in the morning. I could picture electrons coursing through an electrical cord like blood cells through a vein; I only needed to learn the formulas. I took out my notebook.
But there was no formula to stop the electrons flowing from Saint to Vera to Saint, or to change their course. I drew his face from memory, firm chin, noble brow, electric hair, and in his eyes the confused pain I wanted to help him bear. I called his house and left a message with his sister. Call when you come in, I don’t care how late. For a reason I didn’t ponder at the time, I didn’t call Vera.
—
I was asleep in my clothes, but at the first sound of a ring I had the phone in my hand. Usually Saint’s voice had an intermittent bass note under the tenor, but he was all tenor now, strung tight. I turned onto my stomach, phone to my ear under the pillow, just his voice and mine. “Did you just get home?” I whispered. “What time is it?” He laughed, but not at anything I understood. I sat up and turned on my nightlight, as if it would clarify. “What? What’s the matter?”
“That bitch,” he said.
“Don’t say that.”
I listened to him breathe while my heart alternately shrank and sped up. “So you guys didn’t resolve it? The problem? Whatever it was? Please don’t hang up.”
My hand was wet on the receiver. This was new territory for Saint and me. Till now with him, I was the friend in need—with my wicked stepmother, my mediocre grades, my pervasively low self-esteem. I’d complain and he’d make me feel better. But here was an occasion for me to rise to. “If there’s something I can do, Saint, you just have to ask. Anything.” He remained silent. I had to pull words out of my mouth. “You’ve always helped me,” I said. “You’d find me in my dark corner and lead me out.”
“Glad to serve.”
“Stop it.” I forced speech past the lump in my throat. “Isn’t that kind of a weird thing to say? I mean, whatever happened tonight with you and Vee, please don’t take it out on me—”
“Get out of my head, will you?”
I should have been angry then, but I’d started shaking. “Saint, I’m grateful to you, or I was until you—” I was whining; I cut it off. “I know it’s ridiculous but I was trying to make you feel better.”
“Sorry.”
“Are you?”
He was silent so long I was afraid he’d walked away from the phone. Then he said, with pauses between words, “I can’t stand it.”
The remark was spoken as if to himself, but it circled my brain. What couldn’t he stand? Something to do with Vera or my daft attempts at comfort? Or was it the Pledge this afternoon? Further back in time there was the girl who broke his heart who still went to our school. “Listen, please, Saint—you’re such a good person. People love you, Vera and CJ and I, and even that B-I-T-C-H Cathy Kirk—”
A loud crash sounded on his end of the line, like he had put his fist through a window. I dropped the receiver. I’d have picked it up, but it was spewing swearwords. It occurred to me how similar we were, Saint and I, our thin skins, the one difference being that when he couldn’t transcend his hurt he could turn it into rage, while I was stuck with my ineffectual tears. In the dresser mirror I gazed at my face, round like a cabbage. I was ugly, inept. Then I heard my name. “Kay, I am so fucked.”
Eventually I returned the phone to my ear. I liked the way he said “Kay,” in two syllables, Ka-ay. “I don’t know, you were just—”
“A jackass.”
I smiled, though he couldn’t see it.
“Will you tell me the truth?” he said. “Will you be completely honest with me?”
I knew he knew he’d made me feel bad and that he was sorry. Later that night I would realize that was when I started to love him. But at the time I was busy trying to meet what I wasn’t even sure were his expectations. I felt a test coming on, and the possibility of transformation if I passed, and my words tripped over each other in their rush to serve him. “I always tell the truth, to my friends at least—”
He broke in: “Do I seem…? Shit. Do you think I’m…shit! I can’t even say it.”
“You can. Say it.”
He swallowed so hard I heard it over the phone. “Do you think of me, well, as…Kay, do you think I’m manly?”
“Manly?” Stupidly I repeated the word. Did I hear it right? I murmured apologetically, “What do you mean?”
“Get it out, just get it out!” he said, but he was yelling at himself. “Do you think I’m a…? Fuck, do I have to spell it out for you?” His voice rose and cracked, and when the words finally came, they sounded strangled. “Kay, babe, do I act like a homo?”
“Are you kidding?” I started to laugh, then cut it off. Knowing he wasn’t angry with me, I could think more clearly. “You aren’t, of course you aren’t!” I avoided the terrible word. “I don’t even know where you got the idea! How you could think that!”
He took a breath, but his voice was still ragged. He wanted relief, and I wanted to relieve him. But I was laughing hysterically. It had begun halfway through his question and was now unstoppable. Every time I managed to calm down, the notion took hold of me as if for the first time. “You are so…” I began. But my stomach was killing me. My eyes were streaming, my chest heaving with blissful pain. “Saint, are you making fun of me?”
“Why won’t you answer my question?”
My lips were sore from my biting them, my stomach hurt from my hysteria. Homosexuality then was nearly unspeakable, the word “queer” synonymous with all things disgusting. You queer. You are so queer. I felt certain that Saint was not, if only because he attracted me. When I smelled his sweat and deodorant, even his faintly sour breath, my insides went loose. But my mind had filled with the ugly, arousing jargon of sex—screw, fuck, ball—and stomach-hurting laughter was squeaking out of me, at these words that I’d never have said aloud and at my giddy terror at waking my family.
At some point I gathered myself and managed to say what I thought, nodding like an idiot to underscore my words. Then afterward I lay in bed, trembling. In the middle of my chest something had softened and warmed. That he’d asked me for help? It pleased me more than I would have admitted. My heart thudded, and between my legs what felt like another heart was beating too. I wrapped my arms around my pillow, put my lips to the cotton pillowcase. “I love you,” I said, then added self-consciously, “as a friend.”
Because it was our code of conduct, albeit tacit, that affection must flow among the four of us equally. Verboten was the preference of any of us for any particular one of the other three. The group was the ideal family, where differences were not only respected but cherished and no one felt the sear of envy.
6
Saint
Saint arrived in Lourdes halfway through our sophomore year, and after the Cathy mess he gravitated our way. He wasn’t a talker, especially about himself, and maybe for that reason he became for each of us what we thought we needed. Some quietness is thin and weak, as if it comes from fear or because the person has nothing to say. But Saint’s silences seemed to contain depths of pain felt and transmuted. His steady gaze, the bass notes in his warm voice, made you think of good kings, wise rulers of nations—of people with power they didn’t abuse. He had pale eyebrows, a large, straight nose, and a wide, openhearted face, like a Greek statue except for his freckles. And he was physically strong enough to pick me up and twirl me as if I were made of air. Until he asked me if I thought he was queer, I didn’t think he was afraid of anything.
He came from Detroit, and gave us enough of it to convey the family’s downward trajectory. To us he
was exotic, not because of Detroit but because they had been poor. Genuinely, rats-in-the-basement, trouble-paying-the-rent poor, which got worse after his father left. In Lourdes they were better off; his mom cleaned and cooked for the wealthy Kirk family, and they lived in the pretty carriage house behind the main house. But Saint was the only one of us who worked because he had to. I wondered sometimes if the disparity bothered him, though he showed no resentment.
Once, we were disparaging our families as we often did, and he told us his first full-blown memory. He was three or four years old, too young for school, and he came down to the kitchen to find the world gone crazy. Plates, cups, saucers, once stacked in cabinets he could reach only by standing on a chair, lay broken on the floor. He was barefoot, in summer pajamas. It was early morning.
He’d done something wrong: That was his first thought. Gloria, who watched them when his mom went to work (there was a younger sister and baby twins), was going to wallop him, or his mom would when she got home, or Dad, later, harder. And if not him, then his mother would get it. On nights after sunny days when no one wanted his father’s cab, Saint would pull the covers over his head or curl up on the rug by his sister’s crib, praying to find in the morning a bouquet of flowers on the table. It happened sometimes: his father weeping and kissy-hugging his mother, then picking him up, squeezing his breath, saying he was the best boy in this godforsaken world. And they’d all go to Mass, then to Honest John’s for pancakes.
That morning, however, he knew pancakes to reside in a world far, far away, and he tried to fathom the part he had played. He remembered the previous day, he and his sister up in their bedroom, and parent-voices like out of a dream: John, Megan, I want you down here at the table right now. His father’s voice came from the foot of the stairs: If I have to come up there’s going to be trouble. Megan went, thumping down backward with pleasure in her new skill. But Saint was deep in the conflict between the dinosaurs and his army men, Stegosaurus against General Eisenhower. Please! Just a minute! he said, or said in his mind, while slow, heavy shoes made the stairs squeak. He could picture now the strong, weary legs of his father, and he said, aloud and not in his mind: Just one minute. Okay? But instead of lifting him with a laugh and a hug, his father knocked him onto the battlefield of his plastic and metal figures. His created world was gone, an eradication so abrupt and complete it undermined his sense of a stable earth and of himself as a person on it, and he threw himself at his father’s legs. And even though once, at Mrs. Gloria’s, he’d had to sit in the coat closet for biting someone, he bit the hard, hairy flesh under his father’s trousers. It was wrong to bite—he knew that even before the coat closet—but how to stop with your ears abuzz, your mouth full of saliva, teeth ringing to close upon something? He was prepared for a time-out. Instead, his father kicked him.
It had hurt no more than other blows from his father, but the pain held on. Megan was crying, his mother screaming, the room full of noise and people.
“Will, he’s a child!”
“He’s a vicious dog!”
“Someone has got to control themself!”
“You better control that kid or one of these days he’ll get himself killed.”
His mother bent over him. “You mustn’t bite, Johnny. It’s animals that bite!” Megan toddled over and touched his face. He tried to stand but couldn’t move without jiggling what felt like a knife in his back. He lay on the floor taking shallow breaths.
The rest of the evening was blurred by motion and bright light. There was a backseat ride to the emergency room, a ride on a cart to a small curtained place where shoes tapped by down a hallway. A baby was screaming for longer than he thought anyone could scream. There was an X-ray, which didn’t hurt, and wide white strips of tape connecting his back to his front, which hurt a lot. In the car home his father cried, and he started to cry too, and his mother held him. The smell of soap and his mother.
That night in bed, as he lay under his sheet breathing lightly against the binding tape, it had started to rain. Rain came in through the open window, then it seemed to him that his father came with the rain. His father shut the window, kissed his forehead. This had never happened before—his father had no gentle, kissing love for him, only bear-hugging, jerk-your-neck, scrape-your-cheek love, and Saint (named St. John and sometimes called Johnny) took the kiss back with him into his dream, forgetting the whole thing till the following morning when, barefoot in pajamas, he stood in the kitchen doorway. All over the blue kitchen linoleum, piles of white broken things shone in the sunlight coming through the window.
Meggie, who’d crawled downstairs behind him, padded into the rubble in her footie pajamas. She picked up two pieces of something and tried to join them, then sent them clacking across the room. “Tee ha!” The twins were still upstairs in their crib, probably talking to each other as they always did: “A ba ba ba ba ba ba bah!” Soon they would be crying. His mother, who usually skated from one project to another, taking care of everything, was nowhere to be seen. He found her sitting on her bed smoking a cigarette, and he stood at the door, willing her to get up and make coffee and bring it to his father at the kitchen table in his work jacket and Tigers cap. Though downstairs and up, there was no trace of his father.
Eventually her wide white feet marched down to the kitchen, and he followed, waiting for the explanation. She picked Megan up, deposited her on the living room couch. “Stay put, the both of you. Out of the War Zone.” He didn’t move for a while, just sat next to Megan outside the hurricane kitchen with no coffee smell or newspaper and his father’s chair pushed flat to the table.
Later that day, after his mother had swept the shards into a grocery bag and vacuumed, she told him and Meggie that their father was dead. Unfortunately, he’d got sick and died, she said. It was very sad. And they’d have to work extra hard to get along without him. St. John made a fist and punched her arm, and when she didn’t punish him or even yell, he started crying.
“He’s gone and that’s it,” she said. “If someone asks, it was galloping pneumonia.” She made him repeat the two interesting words. Then a week later Alicia Porter Smith across the street said his father had gone away to live without them in the state of Texas, and he hit Alicia as hard as he could—a girl, yes, but older. To his relief, she hit him back.
His grandmother from Boston came to stay with them now that the jackass was gone, her word for his father. “Their wedding china, from my mother in Ireland!” She shook her angry head. “That man is an animal!”
“You’re an animal,” he said.
She pulled him toward her. “What did you just say?”
He looked at her blankly. He had said it wrong; he was the animal. But he couldn’t explain, and she shook him till his teeth clattered. “No man goes off and leaves his children to starve—no one who calls himself a man!” she cried, and sent him to bed without supper. Where he lay in the dark with his hand over his mouth of dangerous biting teeth, thinking crazily: I turned him into china and smashed him to pieces.
—
That happened in Detroit, in the only house they would ever own, which they would vacate for a rental in a loud, decrepit neighborhood. Even in Lourdes, where the house was quiet and safe, it still wasn’t theirs. And in Lourdes now—August 1968—having recently smashed an innocent drinking glass in the kitchen sink, Saint is confounded by repetition. He picks splinters out of the sink, first with his fingertips, then with a damp paper towel, glad only that Kay didn’t actually see him smash it. He doesn’t want to think what she must be thinking of him. Not to mention what Vera is thinking.
He gets down on his hands and knees and towels up invisible fragments (his mother has enough on her hands without his craziness). Is he a destroyer? Better a destroyer than a homo, he thinks, feeling for the last splinters with the flat of his hand.
After the breakage is safely stowed at the bottom of the trash bag, he takes off his work jeans and carries them to the laundry hamper on the porch, checking t
he pockets as he was trained to do. There are five quarters (keep the change, kid), half a dead joint, and his copy of the Pledge signed with everyone’s name, including his own. His heart jumps at the thought of his mother finding it. He goes outside and locks the paper in the only receptacle to which he alone has the key, the box on the back of his scooter. There’s one thing he knows for sure: Pledge or no Pledge, he will not jump. He will not be a jackass like his father.
—
He was in fourth grade when his father returned. Six years had passed, his grandma was dead, his mother no longer smoked or drank and felt sorry for people who did. Their flat, the first floor of a three-story house, was small but clean, and every Sunday they went to church, although Megan fell asleep and the twins whined or giggled. His mother begged God to help Sean and Percy to learn respect, to help Meg with her reading, to free St. John from the vice of anger that had afflicted his father.
With God’s grace St. John seemed to be managing this. One shimmering dawn with no one else up, he had looked into his future and decided to be a priest, and God helped him build a wall in his mind between what he thought and what he did. In his new school he rarely spoke in class, but his teacher liked his calm, handsome face and praised his thoughtful answers to test questions. He had neat handwriting and he never left his seat without permission. Then one night, in the quiet of after dinner, with his mother at the sink washing the dishes and St. John at the kitchen table cutting out of brown construction paper his careful rendition of the state of Michigan, the doorbell rang and there was his father, smiling like he’d been gone a week. He walked into the kitchen and fell to his knees before his wife, on the floor that St. John had just finished sweeping.
Once, in Lourdes Page 7