The Beloved Son

by Jay Quinn

  A bitter silence spoiled the air. Finally, Melanie pushed her chair back and stood. As she walked to her grandfather’s side, she said, “C’mon, Gramps. Get your tape and Sharpie. Let’s me and you go through the house and mark my stuff. That way I can get first dibs on everything.”

  Gratefully, Frank stood and nodded at his granddaughter. “C’mon,” Melanie urged him as she took his hand. Obediently, he allowed himself to be led into the mam part of the house. Karl watched them leave the room and then dropped his head and massaged his brows with his hand.

  “Wow!” Caroline said finally. “How ’bout them Steelers?”

  14

  KARL CHUCKLED and looked at his wife. “Who knew?” he asked rhetorically.

  Caroline lifted her hand and placed it on the back of his neck and massaged it firmly for a moment. “Why don’t you take Sven and I’ll take your mother?” she suggested.

  Karl nodded and gave her a smile as she dropped her hand from his neck. “That’s probably the best way to get past this,’’ he said.

  “Poor Sven,” she said. “To have all that dumped on his head without warning.”

  Karl stood and said, “Poor Dad, to have carried all that crap around for so long.”

  “Promise me that you won’t keep something like that bottled up inside you for years,” Caroline said anxiously. “I hate to say it, but you’re a lot like your father.”

  “Not like that, I’m not,” Karl told her vehemently. “Besides, you and I don’t have the kind of relationship Mom and Dad do. When have I ever kept you locked away, or ever not encouraged you to be everything you can be?”

  “Never,” Caroline told him and smiled. “You’re right. Our marriage is nothing like theirs.”

  “Thank God,” Karl said with a sigh.

  Caroline stood up. “Why don’t you go talk to Sven, and I’ll make sure your mother’s alright,” she suggested.

  Karl nodded and gave her a smile as she dropped her hand from his neck. “That’s probably the best way to get past this,” he said.

  Caroline gave him a gentle nudge toward the kitchen and turned toward the foyer to make her way to the master bedroom. Karl watched her leave the room and reluctantly turned toward the kitchen. Just as he’d had no words for his father, he had nothing to give his brother. What could he say?

  Karl found Sven in the kitchen loading the last of the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. Sven looked up at him with a bitter little smile and said, “Welcome to my world.” He sighed and closed the dishwasher door with a sudden whump. “Dad has been throwing these little tantrums on a fairly frequent basis for a year or more. Don’t let it rankle you. It’ll all blow over soon. Mom will pout for a little while, and finally Dad will apologize and things will just go on… and on and on,” he ended tiredly.

  “Can I give you a hand with anything?” Karl asked Sven gently.

  Sven clicked the dishwasher on. As it began its high-pitched mechanical whine, he turned to Karl, smiled, and asked, “Can you peel potatoes?”

  “Sure,” Karl said eagerly. “That’s one kitchen chore I’m proficient at.”

  “Excellent,” Sven said as he took two steps and opened the cabinet door under the counter by the sink. He pulled a five-pound bag of potatoes from the bin and swung it onto the counter. “Because I hate peeling potatoes. I got a bag of those little baby carrots, so all we have to do is throw them in. If you’ll peel the potatoes, I’ll brown the roast.”

  Karl moved to the counter and opened the bag of potatoes, then began to look for a peeler. Before he could locate one, Sven opened another drawer and handed it to him. “What do you want me to do with them once they’re peeled?” Karl asked.

  Sven gestured toward the double sink and said, “Just put the peelings in one sink and the potatoes in the other. Then rinse them off before you cut them up to add to the pot.”

  Karl nodded and began the process. He was glad to have something to do with his hands. He heard Sven behind him rummaging in the refrigerator and placing a pot on the stove. Within a few minutes, he’d peeled half the bag and could hear the hot sizzle of beef hitting the bottom of the pot, followed by the appetizing scent of meat seared in butter. Glancing over his shoulder, he caught sight of Sven as he stood before the stove with a carving fork in his hand. Sven glanced over at him and smiled.

  “I think you should take the clocks,” he told Karl. “You don’t see many short-case Swedish clocks. Mom’s are treasures. They’re from the early nineteenth century, and they both still work. I had them cleaned and oiled a couple of years ago,” he added.

  Karl could picture the clocks in his mind. As a child, they had first frightened, then bored him. When he thought of their loud, deliberate ticks and tocks, he thought of time dragging on and on. He thought of having to wind them. To him, they were as demanding as a pet. He couldn’t imagine himself taking the time to make them run properly. “Unless Caroline or Melanie wants them, I’ll pass,” he told Sven. “They used to give me the creeps when I was little.”

  Sven laughed and turned the meat. As it browned, he opened a bottle of red wine and stood holding it, waiting for the right moment to add it to the pot. “I’ll take them, then,” he said. “I used to lay awake at night and try to time my breathing to the ticking. I can’t tell you how many nights I fell asleep doing that.”

  Karl turned his attention back to the dwindling bag of potatoes. “You know, Sven… it’s hard for me to imagine what your life was like after I went to college. You were only six years old. It’s like we hardly ever lived in the same house.”

  “True,” Sven said and poured the red wine into the pot. Karl was immediately aware of its scent marrying with the beef. Sven turned the heat down under the pot and walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a container of whole baby mushrooms. After closing the refrigerator door, he made his way to stand next to his brother at the sink. “I remember waiting for you to come home from college. It was a big deal to me. Every time you came home, you made it a point to take me somewhere, to the movies, to the beach mostly. I thought it was so cool having a brother who could drive. All my friends’ brothers were just kids. My brother was like a big cool kid.” Sven removed the plastic wrap from the package of mushrooms and rinsed them in their container, draining the box through his fingers.

  “You were a cool little kid yourself,” Karl told him. “You didn’t act spoiled or bratty. I enjoyed taking you places. But you were so pretty. Everyone used to ask me if you were a boy or a girl.”

  Sven shook the remaining water from the package into the sink and strode back to the pot to add the mushrooms. “I heard that for years,” he admitted. “I caught all kinds of hell because of it.” He chuckled and said in an affected black accent, “Is you a boy or a girl, or is you a faggy?”

  “Was it rough?” Karl asked as he finished with his task and gathered the peelings in his hands to transfer them back to the bag and into the trash.

  “It was interesting,” Sven said wryly as he stepped away from the stove to the cabinet and took out a can of golden mushroom soup and a can of beef consommé from the cabinet. As he busied himself opening them and emptying their contents into the blender, he told Karl, “It makes you ask yourself some tough questions. I think it would be the same thing if I had been born really ugly. When you’re marked by your looks, you have to figure out who you are on the inside really fast.”

  Karl rinsed the potatoes under cold water and transferred them by hands full onto the counter by the cutting board. “When did you know you were gay?” he asked Sven cautiously.

  “Oh, I pretty much always knew,” Sven said as he added the blended soups to the pot of roast and red wine. “At least I had a sense of being inappropriate when I was being myself. I remember Dad giving me these looks, like I had just stepped off the spaceship, whenever I would say or do things. I learned fast to sort of keep what I thought was perfectly natural about things like china and antiques to myself.” He stirred the pot with a wooden spoon
and came to stand beside his brother at the cutting board. Taking up a potato and a knife from the block, he expertly halved, then quartered it before cutting it into fork-sized pieces. “Cut them like that, okay?”

  Karl nodded at his instruction, then proceeded with the task of reducing the potatoes to bite-sized chunks. “Did all that change when Rob came along?” he asked Sven with unfeigned interest.

  Sven turned his back to the counter and leaned against it while Karl cut potatoes and said, “When Rob came along, it was like finding your twin when you didn’t know you had one,” he explained thoughtfully. Then, with a salacious grin, he added, “Of course, Rob wasn’t anything like a brother. He was pretty aggressive.”

  “Rob told me he promised God that if he could have you, he’d never ask for anything else,” Karl said with a smile. “I think it must be pretty special to meet someone that young and never grow apart.”

  Sven pushed himself away from the counter and returned to the refrigerator for the carrots. “I think it’s karma,” he said with a laugh. “You know, I can’t really explain it. I don’t know where he stops and I begin anymore. But I think that’s a good thing. Then, when he decided to move to the condo in Palm Beach, I wondered if it wasn’t time to look for someone else. You know, I’ve only ever slept with four guys in my life. But those three others made me realize I’d rather be with Rob.”

  Sven laid the bag of carrots on the counter and reached for a colander from yet another door under the cabinet. As he rinsed the carrots, he told Karl, “I’ve had some months living alone, and I’ve enjoyed them. But it seemed temporary the whole time. Like I knew Rob would be back.” Sven tore open the bag and dumped the carrots into the colander. As he rinsed them under the tap, he added, “When he asked if he could stay over the other night, it was the first time in eight months we’d slept together. Other than his snoring, it was like he’d never been away.”

  “I guess if you guys could survive Dad, you can survive anything,” Karl said as he grabbed handfuls of potato pieces and walked them to the pot. “I just dump these in, right?”

  “Right,” Sven said as he passed him with the dripping colander of baby carrots. As he added the carrots to the pot, he said, “You have no idea what Dad has put me through over Rob all these years. Did you know he threatened to send me to live with you in Raleigh when I was sixteen?”

  “I know he went so far as to bring up the idea with me,” Karl confided carefully. “He told me it would be for your own good, but Caroline and I weren’t convinced. We could have taken you in, but I told Dad to just leave you alone. It was his problem, not yours.”

  “And what did he say to that?” Sven asked him as he stirred the potatoes and carrots in the thin gravy. “I bet he wasn’t happy.”

  Karl took the knife to the sink and rinsed it before carefully drying it with a dish towel and placing it back into its slot in the block. “I’m guessing from his little outburst today that Dad has never been happy with you,” Karl said gently. “I’m so sorry. If he’d been a different man, your life would have been a lot easier.”

  Sven turned the oven on and continuously pressed its digital pad until it read 375 degrees. Once he’d pressed start, he put the lid on the pot holding the roast and vegetables before he opened the oven door to sit the pot on the lower rack. “There’s nothing to be sorry about, Karl. If he’d been a different man, so would I. And I’m pretty happy with myself.” Sven closed the oven door and looked at his brother with a smile.

  “I’m glad that’s the case, Sven,” Karl told him affectionately. “You deserve to be happy.” He watched as Sven moved across the kitchen and began to wash out the blender. “What do you think of his little outburst just now? I have to tell you, I thought it was pretty fucked up.”

  Sven looked out the window over the sink thoughtfully as he rinsed the blender. As he began to wipe it dry, he said, “Oh, it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. Dad’s told me he didn’t believe I was his son lots of times. He’s never done it in front of Mom, though, at least not until today. It’s just one of the many ways he’s tried to fuck with me over the years.”

  Once again, Karl was surprised by how much his age difference and distance from his brother had isolated him from the emotional wear and tear his family’s interaction had placed on Sven. He was smotheringly worshipped and adored by their mother and emotionally abused by their father. Karl wondered how far it had gone. “Did Dad ever whip you?” he asked quietly. “I just ask because I can count on one hand how many times he whipped me with a belt.”

  Sven turned and leaned against the counter once more. “He never spanked me that much. I caught the odd slap or two, but he never beat me physically. He just made the climate I had to live in torturous. My days were like the seasons; I went from summer m the daytime with Mom to hard winter at night when Dad got home. I got used to it when I was small. By the time I was ten, I figured out how to stay under his radar as best I could.”

  “That’s no way to live,” Karl said sadly. “I didn’t grow up in such an atmosphere.”

  “Well, it is what it is, Karl. No way to change all that old history now,” Sven commented, and looked toward the breakfast room across the counter. From the hall emerged Caroline and Annike, dressed in a different pair of slacks and sweater.

  “Smells good in here, guys!” Caroline announced approvingly as she and Annike sat at the table.

  “Is that pot roast I smell?” Annike asked.

  “Yes, Mom. And I didn’t forget to put in the bay leaves this time,’’ Sven told her with a smile. “Karl helped, too, so it’s a joint achievement.”

  “I peeled potatoes,” Karl commented dryly. “Sven did the most work.”

  “I shall enjoy it more knowing you worked together,” Annike said happily.

  Without moving from the cabinet where he leaned, Sven said, “Mom, now that I’ve got dinner started, I’m going to take off. I’ll see you at mass tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, why leave now?” Annike asked with obvious disappointment. “I am enjoying having us all together.”

  Karl walked into the breakfast room and sat down across from his mother, saying, “I gave Sven the night off to go out to dinner with Rob. That way, I and my family can enjoy you and Dad all to ourselves.”

  “But Sven can go out to dinner with Rob anytime,” Annike fretted. “You are so seldom home.”

  “True,” Karl said, “but we’ll all be together over here tomorrow afternoon to say good-bye before we leave. We’ll have to drop off your car before Sven takes us to the airport.”

  Annike nodded at Karl but turned to Sven and said, “Är den här på grund av din fader? JAG veta du måste bli vred med honom, utow du måste lov på grund av hans dålig beteende.” Is this because of your father? I know you must be angry with him, but you mustn’t leave because of his bad behavior.

  “Nej Pappa har ingenting till gör med den,” Sven replied calmly. “Vi bestämd den här i min ålder hus framför vi kom. I’m inte vred på Pappa,” he said, and he gave his mother a reassuring smile. No. Dad has nothing to do with it. We decided this at my house before we came. I’m not angry at Dad.

  “Han vilja tänka du er vred med honom,” Annike pled as Caro watched Karl try to follow along. He will think you are angry with him.

  “Han veta JAG reser vek,” Sven said evenly. He knows I am leaving. “JAG talat honom när vi fik här. JAG rättvis vilja till glida ute utan talande till honom ackurat nå. JAG er rättvis trött om honom for tiden,” he added, more insistently this time. I told him when we got here. I just want to slip out without speaking to him just now. I am just tired of him at the moment.

  Annike nodded sadly and told Caroline, “Please excuse us. I don’t mean to exclude you.”

  “It’s no problem,” Caroline said consolingly. “I wish I had another language sometimes so I could deal with moments like this in private.”

  Annike patted her hand, turned to Sven, and said, “Go. Give Rob my love.”
<
br />   Sven made his way across the kitchen and around the counter to his mother’s side. He bent and gave her a hug. “Thanks, Mom. There are salad makings in the refrigerator. Caro and Karl will give you a hand getting dinner finished.”

  Annike patted his back and smiled as he stepped away and looked down at her.

  “Caro, Karl, I’ll see you back at my house. Thanks for giving me the night off,” he said.

  “Go have fun,” Caroline told him with a small wave.

  On a sudden impulse, Karl got to his feet and hugged his brother. “We’ll take care of everything here. Don’t worry,” he said.

  Sven gave him a grateful smile and waved before slipping out the kitchen door.

  Once the door closed behind him, Annike looked at Karl and said, “He has every reason to be angry with his father. Frank’s behavior towards him is abominable. But Sven just lets it roll off his back. I have tried to talk to Frank, but he is so stubborn. I want to spank him sometimes.”

  “Dad is just acting out,” Karl told her gently. “He has a lot of misplaced anger about how things are right now, and he takes it out on Sven. I just didn’t know he was so cruel,” he concluded sadly.

  Caroline reached across the table and touched Annike’s shoulder. “I think Sven understands. He’s in a tough place. He loves you both very much and he knows his father loves him, no matter how he takes his frustrations out on him.”