“She makes me sick,” Lisa replied. “She acted like Dad was her amore and as soon as he dies, she screws some old man and gets pregnant.”
Speechless, Pam wondered if it was smart to have caved in to her mother’s demands for an invitation to the beach. If she called them now, made an excuse, they’d have time to find something else to do for dinner.
“What do you think, Brent? Are you as angry as I am?”
“I really don’t give a shit,” Brent answered.
“Okay, you two, what’s going on?” Pam asked, almost certain she already knew, but so appalled that she couldn’t bear saying the words out loud. Her children knew about Marie and Jack.
“Mom, trust me, you don’t want to know,” Brent said. “Lisa, shut up.”
Pam didn’t want to give away too much, just in case what she was thinking and what they were thinking were two different things. “Look, I am all about honesty right now. We can’t have secrets and move forward. At least I can’t,” she added. “I need truth, and I want to give it, too.”
Brent was staring at her intensely.
“We don’t want to cause trouble,” Lisa said, and Brent agreed.
“There’s no trouble,” Pam said. “Only freedom. You both have to know that I have had some struggles lately.” It was her first reference to AIDS since they’d gotten home.
“We don’t want to hurt you, either,” Brent said.
“I won’t say that there is nothing more that can hurt me,” Pam explained. She’d been so worried about protecting their image of their father and now it looked like they may have been on to him long before she learned the truth. “But one of you better spill the beans!”
Lisa rolled her eyeballs.
“Poor Mom, you are such a nerd,” Lisa said.
Pam laughed. Nerd was a nice word for what she was.
Lisa looked at Brent. He frowned in agreement. Lisa continued. “Marie was after Dad all the time, from when we were little until right before I left for school.” Lisa stopped and looked at her mother to see what the effect was.
Pam was trying to look expressionless, but it was a losing battle. Why did she fail to see something that her “little” children saw? Pam didn’t know what the next question should be. Only one came to mind. “What did you see?” Pam asked. Her heart was pounding in her chest.
“She was always on him, always dragging him off somewhere. I hated it! I told him finally. He said he would tell her to stop. But she continued whispering to him, and I know she had him in her room,” Lisa said.
“Lisa, for Christ’s sake,” Brent hissed.
“It’s okay,” Pam told him. “But I think we should leave. I want to continue this where we can express ourselves freely without a waitress coming by.”
They agreed and Brent signaled for the check. The diner was on a lagoon. There were benches placed in a protected cove where they could see the water and hear the gulls.
Pam was struggling with whether to make Marie the fall guy, or to be honest and tell them that Jack abused her when the children were toddlers. She wished there was a psychiatrist’s office they could run to. But she was on her own, and her gut was telling her to stop making excuses, stop hiding, and start telling the truth. She’d let the kids lead the way and if there was a chance where clarity was needed, she would provide it. She felt awful about having put them in this situation because of her failure to observe.
“Did you see Daddy in Marie’s room?” Pam asked, hoping Lisa would pick up where she left off.
Lisa was looking out at the water, where the lagoon widened and mingled with the water from the ocean. Even in the freezing weather, there were diehard fishermen on the causeway, throwing their lines in.
“I did,” Brent said. “It was so frequent it was normal to see Dad come out of Marie’s room in the middle of the night.”
Pam gasped. She grabbed her son’s hand. “I’m so sorry, Brent. This is my fault. I mean, not that Daddy did it, or that Marie allowed it, but that I didn’t protect you both from the knowledge of it. That’s not right, either. I didn’t protect you from the exposure to it. I must have been in denial or, as Marie liked to say, had my head stuck in the sand. I just feel terrible and it is too late to do anything about it.” There was an uncomfortable silence.
“So what you are saying is that you didn’t know,” Lisa said. It was a statement. She had turned to look at her mother, and Pam couldn’t decipher the look Lisa was giving her. Was she disgusted with Pam, or pitying her? “Or did you? For God’s sake, Mother! Do you have any idea how this affected me?” Lisa asked, but she didn’t wait for Pam to reply. “I have felt like crap about myself because my father preferred my aunt to me, and now it would seem that you are confirming that he was fucking her. Am I right, Mother?” Her eyes were piercing, flashing anger as they stared right into Pam. “I even wondered for a while what an appropriate relationship with my father would encompass. How sick!” she sputtered. “I mean, my God! I’ve been defending him and saying that there was no way he could be responsible for your AIDS when all along, you knew!”
Pam grabbed Lisa’s arm. “I didn’t know! I swear to you. I only found out after Jack died. You have to believe me. When I say I had my head stuck in the sand, it refers to all knowledge of him. I had no idea. I couldn’t protect you because I didn’t know. I was too stupid to know, maybe that’s correct. But I truly did not know!”
Brent chimed in and directed his statement at his sister. “Lisa, I think you have to listen to what she is saying. You didn’t know about it, correct Mom?” Brent asked her gently.
Pam shook her head no. “In retrospect, I realize that it seems unlikely, but truly, I believed we had the perfect, charmed life. You children never said anything to me or even let on that there was a problem. Never! You never had a nightmare or bad behavior, never had a call from a teacher at school, or gave me one moment of worry. How would I have known?” Pam explained. And then softly, “Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Brent said.
Pam was confused. Were they attacking her or not? She remembered the time at the beach when Jack was twirling Marie in the air and Lisa stood away from them, brooding. She reminded Lisa of it.
“When I saw what was happening, that Jack was paying attention to Marie, and you were standing there looking left out, I intervened immediately. Whenever I saw anything that didn’t seem right, I challenged you guys, and Daddy. But if you were afraid to tell me, what could I do? I had no idea you were holding back!” There was another period of silence during which the family looked out to sea.
Lisa stood up and stretched with her arms up over her head. “We should’ve had this discussion last spring. I’m pissed!” Lisa turned to look at Pam. “I guess it’s pointless for me to ask why you didn’t say anything when you found out the truth. I’m almost afraid to ask how you found out.”
Brent started laughing. “Jesus Christ! Isn’t it clear why she didn’t say anything? Boy, you are younger than I thought,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Lisa asked. “Mom should’ve asked us right away if we had any suspicions.”
“Hindsight and all that,” Brent said.
Pam was feeling worse by the minute. “All I could think of was protecting you two,” she explained. “Should I tell you how I found out?” She was looking for a way to make them understand, but was the truth too awful to unload on them?
Lisa nodded. She wanted to know; curiosity was devouring her.
“Your father had a young girlfriend, Sandra, the one he left his business to in the will. She got to the hospital before I did to identify the body. They’d called her first.” Pam felt defiant, as bad as at that was. Her own children had pushed her to this. “She saw his body before I did; we passed as I was on my in. I knew right away.”
Lisa burst into tears. “Oh my God, how sad, Mom! But how’d Marie figure into this?”
Pam realized she hadn’t answered that question yet. �
�Marie was jealous of Sandra. It was as simple as that. She made sure the two of us knew that she also had a relationship with your father. It was a case of one-up-man-ship.” For the time being, she decided to leave out the child-abuse accusation and Sandra’s pregnancy. Suddenly exhausted, Pam made the split-second decision that Thanksgiving dinner was not taking place in Babylon this year after all. “Let’s get home, shall we? I need to call our guests and tell them the family meal is off. Why I allowed myself to be talked into it in the first place is a mystery.” She stood up and starting walking toward the car. If her wonderful children chose to stay there in the wind and cold, that was up to them. But she heard them approach the car as she unlocked the doors and got in to drive. The silence permeated the car and when they returned to the beach, it spread to the house as well.
28
By the time Steve Marks arrived at the mansion to drive the women to Babylon, dinner was canceled. Marie was furious, cursing her sister for being selfish and thoughtless. Nelda was dying of curiosity about the reason; it must have been a real doozy for Pam Smith to cancel a celebratory meal. Jeff Babcock was sad that his friend was upset enough to have made the call. Dave was disappointed and curious, but little else. Bernice forgot it was Thanksgiving within five minutes of being told they were staying home.
“Well, I want to go back to your apartment,” Marie insisted. “You have four days off. Why should I stay up here in hell if you’re home?”
Steve vacillated between joy that he didn’t have to go for a two-hour car ride to a place where he couldn’t smoke and terror that he’d have to take Marie home. Why did I ever get involved with her? She made the effort to get dressed and was pulling things together that she cared about; her purse and phone and a book she was reading. “Look Steve, I’m leaving. If you don’t want me at your place, I’m going back to my own apartment.” Unsteady on her feet but determined, Marie was going to leave if it meant taking a subway downtown. “I can do it blindfolded.”
Steve’s shoulders slumped in such resignation that Marie started laughing.
“Okay, let’s go. I guess I have myself to blame for this,” he said.
“Stop. It’s not that bad!” she said.
“What are you going to do for dinner?” Nelda asked. She already had a small ham baking and was thinking about what other accompaniments there were in the mansion larder.
“I’m about ready to puke as it is. All you can think of doing is force-feeding me. I want to go home!”
Steve tapped her arm, nodding toward the front door. With all the energy she could muster, Marie went for the stairs. She was getting out of there.
When Ashton got back to his apartment, the first thing he did was arrange for Thanksgiving dinner to be delivered to Dale’s apartment from Balducci’s. They’d had a wonderful visit and he didn’t think about being lonely for Jack. The next morning he spent a little extra time on his appearance. On the way over to her place, he picked up a bouquet of pink roses. There was pink all over her apartment, and she had a rose on her bed jacket.
He got to her apartment promptly at two; the food was going to be delivered at two-thirty. As he skipped up the stairs to the front door, a taxi pulled up in front of Dale’s building and a man about Ashton’s age got out. Ashton pushed the button on the intercom but there was no answer. Maybe the nurse was off for the holiday and it was taking Dale a while to get to the buzzer. The man saw Ashton pushing the button.
“Dale’s my aunt,” he said, smiling. “Are you here to see her?”
Ashton turned to him and offered a hand. “Yes, yes! Dale is an old friend; she was my math professor in college!” Ashton started laughing at the ludicrousness of it. “We are having dinner together today.”
The man pulled out a key. “Come in,” he said. They walked up the stairs together with Ashton following. “I hate to have to be the one to tell you this,” he said as they got to her door. He put the key in and turned the handle, standing aside so Ashton could go through first. Ash looked around the apartment; it was a physical sensation that she wasn’t there. He didn’t even have to go into her bedroom to check. “She died last night. About midnight. The nurse said she was expecting a friend today but no one knew your name. I’m sorry.”
Ashton couldn’t help himself. She was his last link. With Dale gone, there was no one left. He started to cry. Ugly, hiccupping sobs that grown men hate to admit having. He plunked down in a chair and put his face in his hands. The man stood aside and allowed him this one dignity and didn’t interrupt him. It seemed like an eternity, but probably only lasted for a minute or two, and he was spent. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a perfectly ironed handkerchief to wipe his eyes and nose. “May I use the bathroom?”
The man nodded and pointed to the back of the apartment. Ashton went in and shut the door. He let the water run until it was warm and with his overcoat and scarf still on, he washed his hands and face. There was a towel folded on a shelf above the toilet and he hoped it was clean. After he dried himself off, he took a length of toilet paper and blew his nose. So that was that. He wanted to get out of there, but it was too late to call Balducci’s. What to do? He walked out and the man was still standing in the same place, waiting.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Ashton nodded his head.
The man stuck his hand out. “I’m Dale’s nephew, Ted.” The two men shook hands again.
“I ordered dinner to be delivered in half an hour,” Ashton said. “It’s too late to cancel it.”
“Do you want to wait?” Ted asked. “I have to start looking through her papers today, so you’re not inconveniencing me if you want to wait. I didn’t usually have Thanksgiving dinner with her. We were the last two hold-outs in the city.” Ted smiled.
Ashton was having a hard time getting a read on the man, but he was almost certain that Ted was gay. Homophobic Dale having a gay nephew that she had meals with?
“I don’t want to put you out. You must be upset,” Ashton said. “Yesterday she didn’t seem that bad to me. I mean, I knew she was ill because of the nurse and having chemo, but otherwise, she seemed okay. We had lunch just two months ago and she never let on.”
“She didn’t want us to know how advanced the cancer was. As a matter of fact, she didn’t even tell my mother, who’s her older sister, until right after Labor Day. My folks live in Florida and, of course, they were frantic and called me. Aunt Dale and I tried to get together for dinner at least once a month.” Ted looked around the apartment. “Look, it doesn’t seem too strange; would you stay and have dinner here after all? I was going to go up to Franco’s by Seventy-Ninth and eat there alone.” Ted waited for Ashton’s answer with expectation written all over his face.
Although a romantic entanglement was the last thing on his mind, Ashton didn’t want to be alone today, and they had the bond of Dale to see them through. If there was nothing else to talk about, she would serve.
Dinner arrived promptly at two-thirty. The men pulled a small table and chairs out of the dining room and placed them in front of the bay window that overlooked the park. It was too nice a day to sit in the dark, windowless dining room. They took the containers of food out and prepared their plates to take to the table. Ashton thought of Jack, eating directly out of a Chinese food box. They sat across from each other and began to eat, making small talk.
“So what do you do for a living?” Ashton asked.
“I’m a real estate broker,” Ted said. Ashton’s heart did a little skip. “How about you?”
“I own a design business. I do all the real estate staging here on the East Side.” Ashton took a sip of wine, trying to gauge what this news meant to Ted. “I’m surprised our paths never crossed. New York is such a small town.”
“It does seem like that sometimes! Actually, I sell primarily industrial space in the Financial District,” Ted said. “I live down there, too.”
“So you are one of the few!” They laughed at the same time. “I didn’t know anyon
e was brave enough to,” Ashton said.
“It’s actually nice. There is a real sense of community, believe it or not. The weekends aren’t dead, as you would expect. I like it!” Ted said, asking, “Where do you live?”
“A few blocks from here,” Ashton answered. “I was raised up here and loved it. My parents moved to Florida a few years ago and I miss them, but I would die in the summer. The heat, I mean. Yes, I will probably stay here for the rest of my life.” Ashton laughed again. How much longer did he have? He still felt like a young man. “I’m a perpetual youth.”
“Ha ha, me too!” Ted exclaimed. “My mother warned me that I was starting to look like Pat Boone. I wear sunscreen all the time now.”
The men bantered back and forth for two hours. Ashton forgot where he was, enjoying the company of Ted, who seemed like a gentle, intelligent, decent human being, if one can make those deductions from an afternoon visit. Whatever he was, Ashton was determined that he would get to know him better.
“Are you in a relationship?” he finally asked. Ted was preparing to get up and make coffee, and the question stopped him in his tracks. Ashton was suddenly concerned that he’d misread the man and he would turn out to be straight after all. He could feel the heat spreading through his neck and face, probably bringing a red flush with it.
“No, not for a long time.” Ted sat back down. “I don’t have the energy.” The men started laughing, Ashton shaking his head in exasperation.
“Me either. But I hope you and I can get to know each other. I’m comfortable talking with you. It seems like we have a lot in common. What do you think?” Ashton realized he was entering uncharted territory. He hadn’t approached another man who wasn’t in his circle of friends for years. Jack’s death had freed him from restrictions he’d set for himself. It would be so much nicer to be with someone who didn’t know Jack. Ted stared at him for what seemed like a long time, but finally he smiled.
“That might be nice. I am, for lack of a better word, jaded. I’m always with someone younger, someone who needs me. It might be nice to be with someone my own age who works for a living,” Ted admitted. His words flooded Ashton with well-being. Finally, to be an adult. He would have remained a child with Jack, and now here was his chance to feel like a grownup.
Prayers for the Dying: Pam of Babylon Book #4 Page 16