“Tim, do you remember all the times she took you to the doctor when you were little?”
“It’s a little too late for a laundry list of her good qualities now, don’t you think? All the little kindnesses she did that I might have forgotten?”
“No.” Ruth placed her hands on his shoulders. “That’s not what I’m talking about. It wasn’t the good things. I’m wondering if you remember all the bad things she did to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember how often you were sick when you were a little boy?”
“No,” Tim said. Nick had come to stand behind him now and had his arms around Tim’s shoulders. “I hardly remember anything before those weeks when I was seeing Dave Anderson. It was as if I discovered a whole new part of myself and there were so many emotions welling up inside me that I couldn’t understand.”
“I didn’t know about all this either until the last few weeks. When she showed up on Collingwood Street… when she was still drinking she let slip a lot of things. Then I did a little research and Sam and I talked to some doctors. Psychiatrists, really. There was more to it than just her alcoholism. She physically hurt you. She’s a very sick woman, Tim. I’m so sorry I didn’t understand all that back then. Maybe if I’d been paying closer attention I could have taken you away from her sooner.”
Boisterous laughter was coming from the bar. Rosa Rivera was in no hurry to shoot footage at the florist’s shop, now that she had an appreciative audience here at Arts. She also thought that Jeff and Tony, the young couple who lived across the hall from Marcia on Collingwood Street, might be perfect for her gay wedding plans.
Ruth said, “Come on. You too, Nick. Good, here’s Sam. Let’s all go someplace else where we can talk.
Chapter 19
Sam had looked for parking so long that he’d finally left his car in Tim’s driveway on Hancock, so the four of them headed back there on foot. The temperature was already dropping when they left the restaurant. The wind tunnel down 18th Street was wide open now and the summer fog had enveloped the hills that separated Eureka Valley from the Inner Sunset and the Avenues. Patches of fluffy white cotton broke off from the bulk of it and darted across Castro Street from west to east like jaywalkers among the car traffic. The Sunday afternoon street corner vendors had already packed up and headed home.
Sam talked about his recent business trip and asked Nick how the nursery business was doing. Ruth and Tim listened to them and both had the same thought—that this was typical “man talk” meant to fill in the silence more than to say anything. Ruth didn’t know whether it was a case of bad nerves or a change of heart, but when they reached Tim’s, she became the one to need to talk about everything except the matter at hand.
Nick went to work building a fire and Tim plopped down in the overstuffed chair beside the fireplace. They all sensed a false note of cheeriness in Ruth’s voice. “How about a nice glass of wine, everyone? I brought a bottle of Syrah from Sonoma in my big bag here. There’s still a whole case in my car. Remind me, Sam, and you can carry it inside for me. I’ll go find us some glasses and a corkscrew, shall I?”
Tim stroked Nick’s hair as they stared into the flickering fire. Nick had pulled it back into a pony tail, but Tim slipped the elastic band off and let it fall around Nick’s face. Sam was about to lower himself onto the couch when Ruth yelled from the kitchen, “What on earth happened in here?” and he rushed to join her. “What a big project you boys took on. I’ll bet this was your doing, Nick. Am I right?”
“There’s nothing like a good oak floor,” Sam said, still trying to do his part to fill in any holes in the conversation. This house is pre-earthquake, isn’t it, Tim?” The end of his question might have been cut off by the splashing of the faucet in the kitchen sink, but for whatever reason, Tim didn’t answer. “Maybe I should go down and check on Jane and Ben and the kids,” he said to Ruth while the water was still running.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Ruth said. “I need you now. Open this bottle and take it in the other room, will you?”
Sam smiled and did as she asked.
“These glasses were so dusty,” Ruth shouted toward the living room. “Is it okay if I use a cloth from this drawer next to the sink to dry them?”
There was still no answer. Tim was only half listening as he stared at Nick. He was infinitely grateful to have him there. Ruth returned to the living room, placed the four glasses on the coffee table and Sam poured the wine. “What a lovely idea to build a fire.” Ruth handed one glass to Nick and another to Tim. “Here’s to the four of us all back in San Francisco with a cozy fire on such a chilly summer evening.”
Nick attempted a feeble smile, but Tim set his glass down without tasting it. “Okay, Aunt Ruth, what the hell’s going on?”
Ruth took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “Well, as you know, your mother is at the Redwood Valley Ranch, Tim. She’s always had a hard time getting control of her alcohol consumption and it’s only become worse in recent years, from what I can gather.”
“I know that place,” Nick said. “You see it advertised on TV all the time. I sold them a bunch of plants and some big trees a couple of years ago.”
“I’m sure I admired some of them and they’re really thriving, Nick. You should see the place, Sam. It’s really beautiful… such a peaceful setting and the landscaping is extraordinary. You’d think it was a luxury resort with all the pools and fountains. It was a whole lot nicer than the Wagon Wheel Inn up the road, I can sure say that for—”
“Can we cut the crap now?” Tim interrupted. “What about my mother?”
“Well, your mother seems to be doing as well as could be expected. I stopped back to see her on visitor’s day and she didn’t remember having been in San Francisco at all. Once again she asked me about you, Tim, and I told her that she’d have to finish her treatment first before there was any possibility of seeing you and then the decision would be entirely up to you, of course… not her.”
“Good, I’m glad you didn’t promise her anything.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“You wouldn’t because you couldn’t. Nobody can make me see that woman again!”
“Tim, I’m not asking you to forgive her, but I think it might do you good to understand where some of your anger is coming from.”
“She threw me out! Wasn’t that enough? Wouldn’t that make you angry?”
“Of course it would. That would make anyone angry, Tim, but I’m talking about an earlier time in your life. I didn’t understand when you were little, but your mother did some terrible things to you… long before they threw you out. And throwing you out of the house wasn’t just your mother. That was your father’s decision more than hers.”
“And she did nothing to stop him! She didn’t even try!” Tim glared at her. “What else are you talking about? What else did she do?”
Nick laid the fireplace poker down and sat on one arm of Tim’s chair. He stroked Tim’s back and shoulders now. He didn’t say a word, but he was listening as intently as Tim was.
“Your mother had more than just a drinking problem. Whenever she was frustrated, she looked for someplace to lash out and there you were.” Ruth paused and looked at Tim, trying to grasp how much he understood. “You were such a good little boy, always cheerful, trying to please people, but she found ways to punish you, even when you’d done nothing wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was hiding her out at the apartment on Collingwood a few weeks ago, I thought I could convince her to get some help right here in the city. It was no use. She kept right on drinking. Some nights she’d pass out for a couple of hours and then I’d hear her crying and sometimes even screaming. I thought she’d wake up the whole building. It was a terrible sound!”
Ruth turned to Sam and said, “I tried to make light of it when I called you, Sam. I didn’t want you to worry and I was so relieved to have her out of my hair and into someplac
e that professionals could watch out for her. I was still trying to make sense of the things she’d said.”
Ruth took a sip of wine and a deep breath and turned back to Tim. “Sometimes it was if she was talking to you, like you were still a little boy and she was lashing out at you. She said terrible things about what she was planning to do to you, things she’d already done to you. Your mother is a very sick… very unhappy woman.”
“So that’s why I’ve been having these dreams lately. They’ve been worse since Nick and I found her suitcase, you know. There was one where I was throwing up, sick to my stomach, like I’d been poisoned. Do you really think she wanted to hurt me?”
“I’m not sure of anything, but I think some part of her was trying to make you sick. There are rare cases in the medical books. Maybe she wanted to punish you for the pain she felt or maybe she was trying to get attention and sympathy for herself.”
“Munchausen syndrome?” Nick asked.
“By proxy,” Ruth didn’t expect anyone to come up with the technical term. “She was never diagnosed as such, but tell me more about these dreams you’ve had lately, Tim.”
“I told you the one about your wedding already.”
“No, I mean about your childhood.”
“Just that I’m sick… throwing up… or that I’ve been burned or scalded. I always hurt someplace on my body and then when I wake up I don’t hurt anymore, or only for a minute and then the pain fades away with the dreams. I don’t remember them very well and I don’t remember anything that really happened back then… just in my sleep.”
“Maybe that’s a blessing, dear.”
That night when Nick and Tim were getting ready for bed, Tim reached across to the bedside table. Most of the old photographs that were on his refrigerator on Collingwood were now in storage, but he’d put a couple of them in small frames beside his bed. And there was always the one of his grandmother, from whom he’d inherited this power of dreams. That was the picture he stared at now. He was a little boy with his grandmother’s arm around him on a rough plaid blanket on the shore of the lake in Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. It was the Fourth of July and he was holding a tiny American flag. He was wearing red swim trunks and he had a bandage on the big toe of his left foot.
That night Tim dreamed about Jesus. He knew it was Jesus because his mother had pictures of Jesus all over the house. Tim was in the kitchen of his parents’ house in south Minneapolis. He sat on the counter and his feet dangled in the sink. He had on green shorts and he was kicking the side of the sink in time with the rhythm in his head. A man with long hair stood over him and washed his feet. Tim thought it was Nick at first and he laughed because he was ticklish. Then the man’s hair fell back and Tim looked into the face of Jesus, who spoke in a soothing voice, “A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean.”
Tim was frightened, but Jesus had a kind face and loving eyes like Nick’s eyes when Nick was smiling at him. The water from the tap ran hotter and Tim tried to pull his feet away, but he was overpowered by hands that were stronger than he was. One of the hands wore a small diamond ring and when he looked up again, he didn’t see Jesus or Nick. His mother was holding his feet under the hot water. She sneered, “In the book of John it says that you are not clean. Jesus knew which of his disciples would betray him.”
The grown-up Tim watched from the ceiling now, looking down at the back of the woman’s head. The little boy Tim cried out in a sing-song voice, “Wash not just my feet, but my hands and my head as well.”
The woman who said she was his mother slapped the little boy’s face with the back of her hand and picked up the stiff brush she used to scrub the floor. “You are not clean! I will teach you to betray me!”
A bottle of bleach appeared in her other hand and the little boy Tim saw his blood in the eddy of water from the toe of his left foot running down the drain. He pushed his mother as hard as he could. She fell to the kitchen floor screaming and Tim climbed out of the kitchen sink and ran barefoot out the door.
Tim ran for miles in his dreams that night. He ran around Lake Nokomis and Lake Harriet and Lake of the Isles. He ran past the Calhoun Beach Club and south along the shore of Lake Calhoun. When he looked down at his bare feet in the sand, there was no more blood. He ran west out of Minneapolis past the cornfields and farmyards of Minnesota. By the time he crossed the South Dakota Badlands his little boy’s feet had grown to the size of a teenager’s. He ran across the Rocky Mountains and soon he could smell the salt spray of the sea and hear seagulls scolding him. They might be screaming about Jesus too, but Tim didn’t listen. He was standing in the sand and the bandage was gone. He looked up toward the sun and the water and now he was a man with a man’s feet standing beside the Pacific.
Tim had said that he didn’t remember those awful things his mother did, but they remained in a dark dusty room in the back of his mind. A crack of light threatened to expose them now and he didn’t want to see. Tim wasn’t sure if he’d been running all night. He took a long time to come around on Monday morning and when he reached for Nick the bed was empty. Then he heard an engine that was way too loud for Hancock Street. A voice yelled, “Crank it to the left, now… about a foot more… that’s it.”
Tim remembered riding through the countryside, craning his neck to look out the back window at a shirtless Minnesota farm boy in bib overalls, maybe sixteen… seventeen, a few years older than Tim. He had clumps of manure on his work boots and bits of straw in his hair caught the sunlight. He was waving directions to his father to back up the truck to the barn. They were loading up cattle to take them to the stockyards in South St. Paul.
Tim was jealous of that boy. He wished he lived on a farm. He wished his father had a job where they could breathe air that smelled of hay and clover. He wished he wasn’t sick so much. He wished the doctor was nicer. He wished his mother still baked cookies and didn’t quote from her Bible all the time.
Still naked, Tim walked down the hall to investigate. Nick was yelling to the truck driver, “Crank it a little harder… that’s it… right there… stop.” Nick was still barefoot and shirtless, showing them where to stack the lumber for the new deck. Tim was so grateful to have Nick around. He could even smell coffee.
Chapter 20
“The gay parade in San Francisco is always the last Sunday in June, Aunt Ruth. I can’t believe this is your first one. They celebrate PRIDE in Minneapolis too, you know, but they don’t have half a million people turn out.”
Arts was always closed until the evening shift on Pride Sunday, so the two of them had scored a window table at the Cove Café for an early breakfast. A steady stream of revelers passed by their window headed to the MUNI station. Even though Ruth had lived and worked in the Castro for some time, she’d never seen it quite this festive. Muscular men were bare-chested, sparkling drag queens teetered up the sidewalk in spindly high heels, young gay couples pushed baby strollers or pulled dogs on leashes and everyone displayed at least a splash of color, even the leather boys.
“I’m amazed so many people are out this early, after the Pink Saturday festivities last night.” Ruth blew on her coffee and took a sip. “Lucky neither of us had to work. You know, Tim, the Twin Cities Pride celebration is one of the biggest in the country nowadays.”
“Really? How would you know?”
“I’ve lived in Edina all these years; that’s suburbia, not Siberia. I keep up on things.”
Tim could almost imagine his Aunt Ruth marching down Hennepin Avenue carrying a PFLAG banner. Or organizing their whole contingent. But wouldn’t she have told him? That might have been reason enough to go back for a visit, as long as he didn’t have to see his parents.
“The parade is to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in New York way back in the 60s,” Tim explained. “The cops were busting gay bars for no reason and the drag queens got fed up with it and then some movie star they all loved had just died and everyone was upset about that, so they decide
d to fight back.”
“Which movie star?” Ruth asked while she spread jam on her toast.
“I’m not sure. I think it was maybe Joan Crawford.”
“Joan Crawford?” The voice belonged to a tall man in an apron who refilled their coffee cups. “It was Judy Garland, you silly twinkie!”
“I’m not a twinkie,” Tim protested. “I’m almost 31!”
“Ooh, ancient! You’re Tim, right?”
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“We were at Arts for dinner the other night and my roommate was drooling over you. It’s a good thing we were in Jake’s section or he would have made a fool of himself. Jake told us your name.”
“Oh.” Tim was never sure what to say to such a blatant compliment. “Thanks… this is my Aunt Ruth.”
“I know. She makes excellent Cosmos. I’m Steven.” He had a contagious grin, Tim and Ruth both thought at the same time.
“Thank you, Steven.” Ruth smiled up at him and shook his hand. “I remember you two boys at the bar. What’s happened to our other waiter?”
“He just got slammed, so I’m pouring some coffee, helping him get caught up.”
“Do you have to work all day and miss the parade?”
“Nah, I’ll get off by noon. Castro Street will be a ghost town in a couple of hours before it fills back up again. But YOU, young man… you need to get your gay history straight. Haven’t you ever seen The Wizard of Oz? Haven’t you heard Judy Garland sing ‘Over the Rainbow’ like a thousand times? Look around you! There are rainbows everywhere! You’re in Oz, honey! Joan Crawford, my ass! She would have played Dorothy Gale like a slut. Joan Crawford would have been shagging the tin man!”
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