by James Gunn
“The fuzz?” Gavin said, momentarily lost.
“The heat,” his father said impatiently. “The pigs. The cops.”
“Oh,” Gavin said. “Well, they aren't very important now.”
“It's because of us they aren't,” his father said. “We did it. We were the generation of Mario Savio, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dorn, and Abbie Hoffman—the saints of the revolution. And we kept our political commitments. We worked for McCarthy and McGovern and all the rest. We've kept the faith, haven't we, Peg?” He nudged his wife.
“What? Oh, yes, dear.”
Gavin remembered the strange men and women his father had brought home unexpectedly, the casual conversation about bombs and subversion and old friends, about political theory and weather. One of them kept saying, like an incantation, “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
“What you do now,” his father said, “is play games. All the battles are over, and you don't know it. You're playing games and call them politics. You might at least have graduated.”
“You don't understand,” Gavin said. “I have my diploma. I got that when I enrolled. What I wanted was an education.”
His father shook his head. “What's the world coming to? At least your mother and I earned our degrees. You didn't get your—what is it?—your certificate? Your union card? You haven't got anything to help you get a job, have you?”
Gavin eyed his father without hope for understanding. “Not everybody can work, Dad. There aren't that many jobs.”
“Not for those who don't want to work,” his father complained.
“The good old Protestant work ethic, eh, Dad?” Gavin said bitterly. “I thought you were against all that.”
“Oh, sure,” his father said, “that's easy enough to say when you're young; You can be satisfied with the guaranteed annual income when you're young and single, when you have no responsibilities and can live on bread and peanut butter. But what happens when you get older? You can't spend all your time reading or playing the guitar or in the sack.”
“In the sack?” Gavin repeated.
“In bed,” his father said irritably. “In bed with some chick. A different girl every night. Making out...”
Maybe that was what bothered his father the most, Gavin thought. His great balling days were past, and he envied his son the virility and the opportunity.
“When you've got a wife and a family,” his father was saying, “you want something better for them than the minimum. You want walls around you that you own, a home that's yours, and you want a job to go to, something important to do. Call it the work ethic if you want to, but it's work by people like me that lets people like you collect your guaranteed annual income.”
“Oh, Dad,” Gavin exclaimed, “it's the surplus that does it, our economy of cybernated abundance. There's plenty for all, those who want to work, and those who don't—or can't. Maybe the lucky ones are the ones who want to work and can find jobs. It's all there in economics. You ought to remember.”
“Don't tell me what I ought to remember,” his father said. “I was remembering a lot of things before you were born. You can call it the surplus if you want, but somehow the economy of cybernated abundance doesn't come up with a check when you write home for money. It's your parents who send you the money. It's our pocket it comes out of, and it's us who have to do without something.”
“What did you ever do without?” Gavin asked impatiently.
“Plenty of things,” his father said. “Trips to Europe, new cars, a better house, clothes, a vacation home, a boat, lots of things we thought about and knew we couldn't afford, eh, Peg?”
“That's right, dear,” his mother said.
They sat there facing him, next to each other on the sofa, his mother holding his father's hand, as if protecting each other from the threat that he represented.
“Oh, Mom,” Gavin said, “you know that's not true. You've been collecting my educational allowance from the government all these years, and you've sent me only a few dollars from time to time, only what you had to send to keep me from coming home.”
“Why do you keep calling me ‘Mom'?” his mother said suddenly. “You always used to call me ‘Margaret.'”
Gavin stopped and remembered. “That's right. I did, didn't I. All right ... Margaret.”
“I always used to hate it, too,” his mother said, as if he hadn't spoken. “And you called your father ‘Jerry,’ as if everybody were equal. Your father used to say he didn't want to be called ‘Jerry'—things would go better if you called him ‘sir'—but you wouldn't. Now why do you call us ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad'?”
Gavin didn't know the answer. He had returned home with a lot of false hopes and false memories. He remembered now: it had always been Margaret and Jerry, and he had to yell at them to make them listen.
“I've got a whole box somewhere of your grade-school drawings and your report cards with all the stupid comments on them by those stupid teachers. Why have I kept them? I'm going to throw them away. You drew terribly, Tom, and I was never able to tell you that, any more than I was able to tell you that I didn't want to be called ‘Margaret.’ I had to pin them up as if they were art. And we had to listen to your opinions at the dinner table as if they mattered, as if they were as good as anybody's. There really were a lot of things I hated about being a mother, and I never was able to tell anybody.”
“Maybe you didn't do me any favors,” Gavin said. He tried to remember the good things, how his mother had sat beside him and read to him endlessly. Had she hated that, too?
“How can you say that?” his mother said. “When we sacrificed for you all the time? We never left you with baby-sitters. We took you with us everywhere, even when you were a baby and an obnoxious little brat.”
“I didn't ask you to do that.”
“Oh, you did!” his mother protested. “Everywhere we turned, you were asking: get me this, get me that, take me with you, don't leave me alone, treat me like a person, treat me like an adult, love me, pamper me, spoil me, coddle me, tell me I'm wonderful. And when you weren't asking, the demands were in the air: society was asking for you, telling us that you were unspoiled and good and if we didn't thwart you or kill your spirit you would grow up and be wonderful, be the sort of human being that we weren't. You were a terrible child. We didn't draw a peaceful breath until you went away to college.”
“Besides,” his father said, as if picking up an old cause, “it wasn't your educational allowance. It came made out to us. To help compensate us for the money we spent on you, for the trouble you caused, for the problems of raising a child. Anyway, all that's past and dead. What we want to know is why you came home.”
’”Home,'” Gavin quoted bitterly, “'is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.'”
“Don't flaunt your newfound college learning at us,” his father said. “We know Frost better than you do.”
He could quote the Professor to them, Gavin thought. “Children should not expect love from their parents, any more than parents should expect obedience from their children,” he remembered. “It is an unnatural relationship which is best terminated as soon as possible. The birds and the animals have the right idea. They don't keep their offspring around any longer than it takes them to fend for themselves. They push them out of the nest before the instincts wear thin.”
His father stood up dramatically, looming over Gavin the way he used to do. “You can't stay here, you know.”
Gavin rose to meet the challenge, and his father no longer seemed so big. He had shrunk. He could have looked Gavin in the eye, but he didn't.
“Now, you shouldn't say that, dear,” his mother said helplessly. She turned to Gavin. “But you don't get on with your father, Tom. You're always at each other, arguing, like today. I don't think I can stand it if you're like that.”
“It's your mother I'm thinking about,” his father said. “You have a different way of life. You stay up drinking beer w
ith your friends until all hours, and you come home early in the morning, waking your mother up, flushing the toilet, all that; then you sleep until midafternoon, lay around in the bathtub half the day, foul up the kitchen cooking ungodly messes for your mother to clean up. And you equate all this with greater sensitivity and moral superiority. Besides, there's no room for you. We've got a boarder.”
“I know,” Gavin said. He wondered if that was why they had rented his room, so that he could not move back in. He wondered, too, if there was something between the girl and his father. His father always had been a wanderer, a determined philanderer. That also would explain a great deal. Everything except his mother.
“Perhaps we could fix up a place for him,” his mother said. “There's that little room m the basement.”
His father shook his handsome head, making his long hair toss from side to side. “It won't do, Peg. It just won't do. He's declared his alienation often enough; let him put it to practice. He's alienated! Hell, I'm alienated!”
His mother turned helplessly back to Gavin. “You mustn't blame your father, you know. It's me, and he knows it. I simply can't stand having you around. I know it sounds awful, like I'm an unnatural mother. But I didn't take kindly to motherhood. It was a shock and a trial. Not everybody is cut out to be a mother. You don't find that out until too late. And then there's the pain—seeing your child making the wrong choices and not listening to you. I can't stand that anymore.”
Her voice faded as Gavin heard the Professor saying, “Children won't take advice—that's the basic problem. They refuse to profit from the experience of their elders. They think it's all new, that life started with them, that no one ever felt what they feel—but we've got an advantage, we older people: we may no longer be young, but we've been young, and you've never been old.”
“Somebody called it the tyranny of the eternal now,” his mother was saying. “If you won't let us help you avoid its consequences, or of your lack of understanding of yourself and the world, and the prices you must pay eventually for what you do now—why, we won't subject ourselves to the agony of seeing you heading for the nearest cliff, deaf to all our warnings.”
Gavin looked at his father and then at his mother. “Thanks for the welcome home,” he said, and started for the door.
“Where are you going?” his mother asked, anxious about him now that the decision apparently had been reached.
“I'll think of something,” he said, recognizing the pathos in his voice, realizing the pain it would cause his mother, not caring.
“You can't just walk out of here like this,” his mother said, turning to his father. “You've been too hard on him, Jerry. Do something!”
"I've been too hard on him!” his father said. “Who called me at work all in a panic? Who insisted I come right home?”
The moment was familiar, a moment that at another time Gavin would have greeted with joy, knowing he had won, knowing that they had turned upon each other, knowing their united front was broken....But it was too late.
His father turned to Gavin. “Look, Tom, I didn't mean you had to leave right this minute—only that you shouldn't plan on anything permanent, or allow the temporary to extend day after day into the same thing.”
“Never mind,” Gavin said. “You've won. I'm leaving.”
“Not without lunch,” his mother protested.
“I'm not hungry,” Gavin said. It was a lie, but he knew he couldn't sit around a table with his parents and the boarder, exchanging little lies about what he had been doing and what had happened to people his parents knew that he had forgotten, if he ever knew them.
His father was rummaging through his billfold. “Look,” he said, “I don't carry much money anymore, what with the new universal credit card, but you'll need something to get started. Here, take this twenty, and I think maybe I've got some more stuck away upstairs.”
Gavin looked at the three bills in his father's hand, shaking just a bit now that Gavin had seized his position of moral superiority. “You can't buy peace of mind through me. And I'm not for sale either. ‘Naked came I into the world, and naked must I go out.'”
“Yes,” his father said, “and, you damned fool, you'll go through life tilting at windmills, too. Oh, I give up!” He turned and sank into an easy chair, his back to Gavin in renunciation. He tossed the money on the floor beside the chair.
“Oh, Tom,” his mother said. “If you knew what I went through. If you knew what I'm going through now. Oh, Tom!”
But Gavin was beyond being blackmailed by his mother's trauma. He recognized the appropriateness of the moment, turned, opened the front door, and went onto the porch, closing the door firmly behind him. It closed like the door of a tomb.
“Hello, again,” a girl's voice said. It was the boarder, sitting on a swing to his left.
Gavin looked at the half-open window to the living room. She had heard everything.
“I'm sorry things turned out this way,” she said, swinging gently. She wore a white blouse covered with little blue flowers, and a matching blue skirt. She had good legs, and the skirt did something to Gavin's imagination that he tried to suppress. It was only that he hadn't seen a skirt for a long time, he told himself. “In a way,” she said, “I feel responsible.”
“Why should you feel responsible?” Gavin asked. He resented her pretending to an importance in his life that she could never have.
“You know,” she said, frowning delicately, “if I hadn't taken over your room, your parents wouldn't have been able to use that as an excuse.”
“Don't flatter yourself,” Gavin said curtly, and reached for the screen door.
“Where are you going?” Elaine asked. She swung to and fro.
“What business is it of yours?”
“I do feel responsible,” she said, and smiled. “I can't help it. I have an overpunitive superego.”
Gavin stared at her. “If you must know,” he said, the screen door open in his hand, “I've decided to head for the West Coast.” The moment he said it, he knew it was true. Sometime in the period between his decision to leave home and her question, he had decided to go to Berkeley, where it had all started, where surely the revolution would be run properly.
Besides, Berkeley was adjacent to Oakland, and Jenny—dear, lovely, confused, frightened, lost Jenny—had come from Oakland. Perhaps, if she had survived that terrible night beside the river, she might have returned to her home.
He had hope, at least, which is more than he had felt for days. “What?” he asked.
“I said,” Elaine repeated, “'without money?"’
“I'll hitch my way,” Gavin said. “There's always people who'll give a fellow a ride, always a freak who'll share his meal.”
“But you don't know who might pick you up,” Elaine said. “All sorts of strange people are around these days.”
She looked childish and innocent. Gavin could scarcely keep from laughing. Instead he walked through the doorway and let the stiff spring slam the door shut behind him.
He walked slowly along the sidewalk under the arching oaks and Chinese elms and locusts and walnut trees. He had the feeling that the Professor was walking along beside him, nodding, saying, “Every adolescent must pass through two crucial periods: one when he identifies with a model—a father, an older brother, a teacher; the second when he dissociates himself from his model, rebels against him, reasserts his own selfhood.” All right, Professor, he thought, I should have known I couldn't go home.
The houses didn't look the same as they had a few hours before. They were false fronts, hiding shame and misery and degradation and despair. He nodded at them as he passed, and spoke to them: “Good-bye, Mr. Cacciopo, and how are all the Cacciopos, and do the neighbors still send anonymous letters about Mrs. Cacciopo's indecent fertility? Good-bye, Mrs. Green, and does that strange car still park twice a week until early in the morning in front of the widow's house? Good-bye, Mr. Williams, and is your church still strangely empty on Sunday morning
s while all the holy houses of the odd religious cults bulge six nights a week? Good-bye, Mrs. Stucker, and is your defective child all grown up now and still living with you to protect him from the institutions that might teach him how to go to the john and dress himself? Good-bye, Mr. Washington, and have the neighbors finally accepted their black family and do they invite you to their homes and their block parties? Good-bye, Mr. Froelich and Mrs. Mazanec and Mr. McCaslin and Mrs. Solsky, and how are all your little problems? Do your children grow up and become unmanageable? Do they discover that they know more of the truth than you, that they are born into this environment and you are only immigrants, that they are a new breed upon this earth who love each other, who don't want to compete with each other, who hate only war and injustice and repression, who have a vision of a better way and know that somehow, someway, they must reach it? Does it break your heart? Do you drive them out? Do you ship them off to college? Do you bribe them to stay away? Do you hate them?”
That was all very well, but Gavin couldn't forget that he was hungry. Pride was a wonderful companion, but he couldn't eat it. Pride made him feel as tall as Goliath, but hunger was the little David that brought him low. He thought about his mother's cooking, and wished, at least, he had stayed for lunch. What would it have cost him? And then he thought about the dialogue that would have followed his surrender to his belly's tyranny, the loss of face that his yielding would have involved, and he swallowed hard and moved on toward the bus stop.
The trip back to the heart of town and the monorail ride to the Interstate at the outskirts were remarkably different from his experience earlier that day. Then hope and expectation had brightened the streets and glorified the people. Now he saw quite clearly that the streets were only superficially clean; dust swirled behind the bus as they passed, and a paper wrapper danced in a gutter. The people weren't so much cheerful as they walked along the streets as sullen and unsmiling, the prey of secret doubts and conflicts. Gavin read their characters as he passed, and was content. This city wasn't so much an old folks’ home as a concentrationn camp, cleverly disguised by facelifting and apparently free entrance and egress.