‘That’s classic,’ Heinlein said. ‘The orphan is always looking for acceptance but always expecting rejection. It’s like they feel they’re never wanted and can never fit in. Their birth mother rejected them so they think there’s something wrong with them: they expect everyone else to reject them too. So you get the orphan who spends his whole time being obliging and docile in the hope his new parents won’t send him away. Then you get the other type who’s always causing trouble, like he’s saying, “I know you’re gonna reject me, so screw you – I’m gonna reject you first!” That behaviour’s called testing-out and it can get pretty extreme. Now to me it sounds like your boy’s got a bit of both in him. And I’m sorry to say it, but that sort always end up pretty screwed up: they have problems with trust and intimacy, with sex and relationships. Half the time they’re fretting about conforming and living blameless conventional lives, and the other half they’re giving in to crazy impulses and addictions and taking risks that end up killing them.’
Doc sighed into his mug.
‘Yeah, well, I guess I read something similar to that. So what’s to be done about it?’
‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ Heinlein mused. ‘It all goes back to our earliest experiences and the way they shape the rest of our lives. Did you know babies can pick out their mother’s face minutes after they’re born? Forty weeks in utero means they’re already pretty bonded, so being abandoned is a big thing. Even though your kids were given away the minute they were born, they’re still going to remember it at some level, and it’s still going to be devastating for them.’
Doc chewed this over.
‘Actually, it’s worse than that, Gus. They were with their moms for three whole years,’ he said finally. ‘And when they left, it was against their mothers’ wishes. We’ve never told them about that.’
Gus stared in amazement at his colleague’s disregard for his children and, with a supreme effort to retain his professional detachment, forced himself to nod sympathetically.
At the next therapy session Dr Heinlein tried hard not to look guilty. He was fond of Mike and felt bad about speaking to Doc behind his back. He was keen to make it up to the boy with a really probing, cleansing session, so he started with a really tough question.
‘Would you say, Mike, that you find it impossible to allow people to get close to you?’
Mike was momentarily thrown.
‘Gee, Dr Heinlein. Nice to see you too,’ he joked. But Heinlein’s face was serious.
‘Many orphans feel that way, Michael, and you’ve mentioned before that you found your relationship with Miss Inhelder very difficult.’
Mike shifted to make himself comfortable.
‘I wish I’d never been in that show,’ he said. ‘I wish I’d never gotten close to her.’ He paused. ‘Uncle Loras too.’
Heinlein looked up.
‘You regret the close relationship you had with your uncle?’
‘Whenever I get close to people, they always disappear. ’
Heinlein made a note on his notepad.
‘Death is a natural thing, Mike – a terrible, tragic thing, but a natural thing. We all fear it, we all experience it. It’s OK to mourn, but blaming yourself will get you nowhere.’
Heinlein decided he needed to lighten the mood – he hadn’t intended the subject of death to crop up so early in their relationship.
‘Anyway, I’m sure you don’t really regret taking part in the show – you’ve told me before that it was one of the highlights of your life!’
Mike gave a little shrug.
‘Yeah. It was.’
‘So why do you think you enjoyed it so much, Mike?’
Mike thought for a moment.
‘It was . . . an amazing feeling, being up onstage with everyone watching me . . . loving me.’ He blushed, conscious that he sounded arrogant. ‘And . . . I loved dressing up. I loved playing Patrick. It seemed . . . so simple to be up onstage, saying lines I’d already learned, going through motions I’d already rehearsed – knowing where I was heading and how things would end.’
‘You loved the pretence, is that it? You loved the mask? Getting to be somebody else – having everybody watch you without really seeing you?’
Mike looked sharply at the doctor. That was exactly how it had felt.
‘So you like to disguise parts of yourself,’ Heinlein probed, ‘behind performance, behind charity work, behind conformity and obedience . . . because you’re frightened of letting people see and maybe judge the real you?’
‘It’s hard to relax when you’re worried about that stuff,’ Mike assented.
‘But why are you trying to hide, Mike?’
There was a long pause before Mike said, in a tiny voice, ‘I don’t know.’
‘What would happen if you stopped pretending and let the world see the real you? I think they might find you quite wonderful.’
Mike looked at Doctor Heinlein with gleaming eyes. ‘They wouldn’t . . . believe me, Dr Heinlein – they wouldn’t. I’m . . . not like other people. I’m . . . different, like someone deformed.’
‘Slightly unformed maybe – but not deformed, Mike. If you told me the innermost part of yourself, the part you’re more afraid than anything of other people seeing, I guarantee it would be nothing that I hadn’t heard before. What are you most ashamed of, Mike? There’s nothing you can say that would repulse me or shock me. You are safe from judgement here.’
Mike began to cry. He wanted so much to tell kind Dr Heinlein the truth, and before he knew it he was telling him all about Marius Inhelder of all people: how beautiful he had seemed in the car that night they drove to Mr Henry’s; how like Charlotte but so much more powerful . . . In rushed, hitching breaths he described the attraction, the complicity he had felt watching Marius laugh and chat with his friends, the way his neck had glowed in the moonlight as he’d driven them home, how he had wanted to reach out and touch it.
‘I felt like there was something wrong with me . . . something wrong inside,’ Mike explained, desperately looking to the doctor for help, explanation, reassurance.
Dr Heinlein, leaning forward in his chair with rapt attention, suddenly looked at the clock. ‘Time’s up, Mike,’ he said softly. ‘This has been a very good session and we can continue where we left off next week.’
When Mike left, Doctor Heinlein reluctantly called Doc Hess.
‘Doc,’ he began determinedly, ‘I need to ask you something. Have you ever thought there is a chance your son might be – excuse me for asking this – a homosexual?’
For a brief moment there was silence on the line and then Doc burst out laughing.
‘You know what, Gus? Spare me the Freud. Mike may be a lot of things, but if there’s one thing he most certainly is not, it’s a goddam faggot!’
Shortly afterwards Doc announced that the counselling sessions with Dr Heinlein were over.
SIXTEEN
1969
Arriving in Washington DC that summer was like taking a crash course on street politics. President Nixon’s promises to wind down US involvement in Vietnam had not been matched by deeds, and public opinion was turning as American GIs continued to come home in body bags. Descending from the Greyhound at the back of Union Station, Mike found the streets leading to the Capitol filled with crowds wearing black armbands and carrying anti-war banners. He heard them chanting, ‘Hell no, we won’t go!’ and, ‘I don’t give a damn for Uncle Sam, I ain’t going to Vietnam!’ There was an atmosphere of solidarity and purpose among the demonstrators that drew him in; most were young and serious-looking, fired by an intensity of feeling that Mike found exhilarating. He let himself be carried along, inhaling the sense of history and the sweet odour of pot. He felt he was at the centre of important events – his years in Rockford and the concerns of his youth seemed suddenly trivial. He needed to be here, where he could make a difference on the big things, like the shame of Vietnam and the injustice of poverty and discrimination.
He stayed wit
h the demonstration for an hour, but he was carrying his backpack and starting to get hungry. As darkness fell, he went looking for Webster Hall, the congressional dorm where he would be boarding for his four weeks in Washington. He had the address and knew it was close to the Supreme Court Building, but the DC system of geographical quadrants – NE, NW, SE and SW – confused him and he found himself wandering through a series of neighbourhoods north of the Capitol where burnt-out houses lined the streets and shopfronts were boarded up with painted signs warning against looting. The race riots following the death of Martin Luther King had left an enduring scar on the face of the nation’s capital, a reminder of the tensions that ran beneath the affluent society Mike was used to, where such things were glimpsed on the TV news if at all.
By the time he reached Webster Hall Mike was feeling agitated and disoriented but strangely excited. He was in the heart of the nation’s capital, and this was where he could change things for the better.
Michael’s official title was Page to the Senator. He had been told broadly what his duties were: delivering documents and mail within the congressional complex, taking messages for Senator Dirksen, calling him when he was needed on the phone and carrying papers to his desk in the Senate. He was looking forward to meeting Dirksen and telling him exactly what he thought about the key issues facing the nation and about the older man’s lamentable record on them. Dirksen was a fiscal conservative, a protectionist and one of Congress’s leading hawks on the Vietnam war; Mike was going to tell him he was wrong on all counts.
In his seventies now, big-handed, big-boned, white-haired and jowly, Dirksen had the air of a man supremely at ease with life, comfortable with his role, unhurried and friendly. His welcome to Mike seemed genuine.
‘Well, well, a young Hess,’ he boomed, striding across the room. ‘Come here and shake my hand, young man. You are indeed welcome and not just because your dad was the one who spotted my prostate back in the day and maybe – I say maybe – saved my worthless old life.’
Dirksen saw the look of surprise on Mike’s face and smiled.
‘Oh, don’t pay no heed to me, son. I’m just a farm boy from Illinois and I say what comes into my head. Dirksen, Hess – we’re all Deutschers, you know. Anyway, what do you make of the place?’
Mike looked around him at the plush carpets and wood-panelled walls. The place looked fusty, self-absorbed, apprehensively protected against the real world.
‘Well, it’s pretty impressive, Senator. But I think—’
‘You think it all looks fuddy-duddy and out of touch – that what you think? Well, I can’t blame you. Think the place needs shaking up, huh?’
Mike was clearly not the first Young Turk Everett Dirksen had come across. His remarks were made with amused bonhomie and Mike’s inherited reflexes made him smile back. He didn’t mean to, but somehow he couldn’t help it.
‘Well, Senator, I don’t say that, but—’
‘But we could do with some new thinking, could we? “Senator, Congressman, please heed the call . . . The times they are a-changing”?’
It was said without malice and with such self-mockery that Mike couldn’t avoid liking the man.
‘No, that’s not what I mean to say. But I do think the country needs to do something about the war and how to use our resources to help the poor and the underprivileged.’
Dirksen’s face grew serious.
‘Well said, son,’ he shot back. ‘Your opinions are honourable and I for one share them. It’s a sad fact that politics doesn’t always allow you to do the right thing; sometimes you just gotta choose the least bad one. But you can rely on this: everything I do is with the interests of this great country at heart, and I would be honoured if you would give me your support, as a member of our young generation, in the efforts we’re making to ensure this country’s future. What do you say, young man? We’d sure like to have you with us.’
Mike looked at him and knew it was a speech he had given a thousand times – he could see why he was known as Oily Ev, the Wizard of Ooze – but something about the appeal and the way it addressed him, Michael Hess, as an individual, a person worth courting, got to him. Despite his best resolutions, he shook the proffered hand. The senator was opening the door to a world people respected, solid, enduring and reliable. Mike desperately wanted to belong, and he wanted to be wanted.
Dirksen gave him a grin.
‘Good to have you on board, Michael Hess. Good to have you, son. Now I gotta go vote, but we’re having a cocktail this evening – very informal and very exclusive – so I want you to be sure and ask Miss Gregson in my office for all the details. I’m counting on seeing you there.’
When Dirksen was gone, Mike mulled over the conversation. It felt like he’d been taken by a clever con man, but it also felt good to be part of his stable, reassuring world with its unquestioned rules you could live your life and judge yourself by.
The month in Washington went by in a buzz of working days and partying nights. Dirksen worked his staff hard but rarely failed to make them feel loved and wanted. And that was the drug that kept Mike hooked, the reward that made him forget his scruples. The price of belonging was a minimal one – commit yourself to the party and the party will give you the acceptance you crave.
When he returned to Rockford, he said little about his experiences and replied cursorily to Doc’s questions about the senator. But he told Mary his stint in Washington had opened his eyes to a different world and a different way of thinking about himself. He felt he was on the threshold of doing something worthwhile at last.
‘You feel like you’re part of the new generation,’ he told his sister the night he got back. ‘It’s like you’re knocking on the door of the establishment and – amazingly – they’re opening the door and letting you in.’
‘Wow.’ Mary grinned. ‘That sounds so cool, Mike. I’m . . . kinda surprised by the Republican thing though. I thought you hated them. Every time Doc says what a great party the Republicans are, you always pull a face.’
Mike looked a little embarrassed and said quickly, ‘Yeah, well, the key thing is to be accepted, Mary. To be a member of the big boys’ club. Then I can think what to do next.’ Mary frowned. ‘I guess,’ she said uncertainly.
Mike’s optimism was clouded by two events that followed soon after.
In late August James wrote to say his wedding would take place in the fall. After he finished with the army he and Shirley were fixing to settle in Iowa City, where he planned to resume his law studies and train as an attorney. The letter gave the time and place of the ceremony and James said he really hoped Doc and Marge and all the family would come. In a last attempt at reconciliation with his father, he said he was sorry if he had offended anyone and it had never been his intention to do so; he had always tried to be a good son and he was sad if other people didn’t see it that way.
At breakfast on the day the letter arrived, Doc read the three handwritten pages in silence before announcing that no one would be going to any wedding. He destroyed James’s note and wrote a reply that he didn’t show to Marge. When she asked what he had written, he said it would be a long time before they spoke to James again. He didn’t say he was disinheriting his son, but he told his other children they were no longer to contact him in any way. Mike said nothing, but he recalled his Uncle Loras’s dying injunction and resolved he would follow the dictates of his conscience before those of his father.
Then in September, just weeks after Mike had returned from his internship in Washington, he picked up the Chicago Tribune and read the front-page report: ‘Everett Dirksen, dead at 73. Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen was eulogized today as a Senate man and a leader whose unique style is the stuff of legends. The Senate met for 12 minutes and adjourned in tribute . . . President Nixon called him an individualist of the first rank, who belonged to all of us because he always put his Nation before himself . . .’
Dirksen had died in Washington DC after unsuccessful surgery on a rapidly metas
tasizing prostate cancer that had spread to his lungs.
SEVENTEEN
1970
Mike graduated from Boylan in June 1970 with the best grades of any male student. He and Joy Heskey, the top female student, were honoured at a ceremony in the school auditorium by Bishop Art O’Neill, who had filled the post after Loras Lane’s death. Marge and Doc loved the pomp and prestige, the speeches and the congratulations. They were delighted with Mike’s performance and they told him so. His grades guaranteed his acceptance by the University of Notre Dame, which both he and Doc had been hoping for. Mike had thought of studying theology – Notre Dame’s Catholic heritage and Irish connections made it seem the logical thing – but after his time in Washington, and with Doc’s encouragement, he had elected to take a BA in government.
Back home after the graduation ceremony, they sat around the table and drank champagne. They toasted Mike and Doc said he hoped they would be celebrating again next year when Mary graduated, but she pulled a face and said, ‘Don’t hold your breath, guys.’
For Marge the occasion was a sort of vindication. As she watched Mike and Mary fooling around, taking turns to wear Mike’s mortar board, she thought back to the day they had arrived from the airport. It seemed a long time ago now; there had been tough times, plenty of them, Marge reflected, but moments like this made it seem worthwhile.
At around eleven Doc stood up and said, ‘Ah well, there is work to be done in the morning’, which was usually the signal for everyone to go to bed. But when the others went upstairs, Mike stayed in the kitchen and took a beer from the refrigerator. The eulogies at the graduation had left him with a sense of elation that wouldn’t let him sleep.
A little later, when Marge came down in her robe to get herself some water, Mike surprised her with a long, heartfelt hug.
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 16