I knew something was up, Mr. Jervis was saying. When I brought her peaches the other day, I thought she was trying to say something to me in code. But he must have had the eagle eye on her the whole time.
A maroon minivan pulled up. My father. When he saw me, he came running over. What the heck is going on here? he said to one of the policemen. I just thought my ex-wife was losing it. I wasn’t expecting to see all you guys here.
Someone called in a tip, the police officer told him.
They were putting Frank in the backseat of one of the police cars now. He had his hands behind his back, and his head was bent down, avoiding the cameras probably. Just before they had him all the way in the car, he looked up one more time, at my mother.
I don’t think anyone else saw it but I did. No sound—he was just mouthing the word. Adele.
CHAPTER 21
THEY CHARGED HIM WITH KIDNAPPING my mother and me. This time, they’d lock him up and throw away the key, they said.
When she heard this, my mother—a woman who hardly ever drove anyplace anymore—drove to the capital to see the prosecutor, with me alongside to be her witness. She had to make him understand, she told him, that no unlawful detainment was involved here. Of her own free will, she had invited Frank into our home. He was good to her son. He took care of her. They were going to get married, somewhere in the Maritime Provinces. They were in love.
This prosecutor was a hard-liner, recently elected to office to support the governor’s war on crime. The question will have to be considered, he told her, why your son never reported what was going on. They’d take my age into account, he said, but it was possible—unlikely perhaps, but possible—that I’d be viewed as an accomplice to a felony. This wouldn’t be the first time that a thirteen-year-old served time in juvenile detention, though probably only for a year. Two at most.
My mother, on the other hand, could be looking at a significantly stiffer sentence. Harboring a fugitive, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She would lose custody of me, naturally. They were already speaking to my father about that. Evidently even before this episode, there had been incidents suggesting questionable judgment on the part of my mother.
For once, my mother said nothing, driving home. That night, we ate our soup in silence, out of two bowls retrieved from the backseat of our car. Over the next few days, anytime we needed a cup or a plate, a spoon, a towel, that’s what we did. Go out to the car for it.
School was in session now. I entered seventh grade enjoying a new and unexpected fame that translated into something like popularity. Is it true, a guy asked me, in gym—as the two of us exited the shower, naked and dripping—that he tortured you? Was your mother his sex slave?
With girls, my recent adventures seemed to translate into something resembling sex appeal. Rachel McCann—for years, the chief object of my fantasies—found me at my locker one day as I was gathering my books to make a hasty retreat home.
I just wanted you to know I think you’re incredibly brave, she said. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you.
It was one of the many regrettable aspects of that strange holiday weekend that just at the moment when I had finally won the notice of the girl I’d dreamed about since second grade, all I wanted was to be left alone. For the first time, I understood my mother’s decision, years ago, to simply stay home. Though for me, this was not an option.
Around this time, my mother discontinued her subscription to the newspaper, though I followed the case by reading the paper at the library. If she ever fully understood how it had happened that charges were never pressed against her, that there was never a trial, she didn’t talk about it and I didn’t bring it up. Had the D.A. chosen to pursue the matter, it would not have been difficult to extract testimony from Evelyn (as for Barry, nobody thought about what he might have to offer) in which it would have been apparent that over the six days in question, my mother had not appeared to be under duress, or doing anything—besides taking care of Evelyn’s son, perhaps—she didn’t want to do.
But I understood, more than you might think a thirteen-year-old would. Frank had struck a deal. Full confession. Waiving right to trial. In exchange for the assurance that they’d leave my mother and me out of it. Which they did.
They gave Frank ten years for the escape, and fifteen for the attempted kidnapping. It’s ironic, the prosecutor said, when you consider that this man would have been up for parole in eighteen months. But we’re talking about a violent criminal here. A man without control over his own crazed mind.
I can’t regret anything, Frank told my mother, in the only letter she received from him, after the sentencing. If I’d never jumped out that window, I never would have found you.
Given his escape attempt, Frank was designated a high-risk prisoner, requiring detention in a maximum-security facility of a kind that did not exist in our state, or anywhere close. They sent him briefly to upstate New York, where my mother tried to visit him one time. She drove all the way, but when she got there, they told her he was doing solitary. Sometime after that, they transferred him to someplace in Idaho.
For a while, after it happened, my mother’s hands shook so violently she couldn’t even open a can of Campbell’s soup. She voluntarily relinquished custody of me to my father. Right before he came to pick me up, to take me over to the house where I would live with him and Marjorie and the munchkins, I told her I would never forgive her, but I did. She could have pointed out things I had done, far worse, but she forgave me those.
SO I MOVED INTO MY FATHER’S HOUSE, the one he shared with Marjorie. As I’d anticipated, they bought a bunk bed so Richard and I could more easily share his small room. He took the bottom bunk.
Lying on the top, at night, I no longer touched myself as I had back home. As much as I had loved that new and mysterious sensation, I associated it now with everything that broke a person’s heart: whispering and kisses in the dark, the slow deep sighs, that animal cry I had only briefly misunderstood as being about pain. Frank’s wild, joyful moaning, as if nothing less than the earth itself had opened up and a flood of light obliterated everything.
It all began with bodies touching other bodies, hands on skin. And so I kept mine to my sides, and my breathing steady, and stared up at the ceiling above my hard, narrow pallet, at the face of Albert Einstein, sticking out his tongue. The smartest man who ever lived, maybe. He should know, the whole thing was one big joke.
The only banging audible now, on the other side of the wall, took place around five thirty every morning, the sound of my little sister, Chloe (because that’s who she was, I saw now—my sister), announcing to the world that another day had begun. Come get me was her cry, though not in so many words. And so after a while, I did.
Marjorie tried her best. It wasn’t her fault I wasn’t her son. I stood for everything that wasn’t normal in the very normal life she and my father had set out to make for themselves and her two children. She didn’t like me very much, but I didn’t like her either. Fair enough.
With Richard, things went better than you might have expected. Whatever our differences—my preference to live in Narnia; his, to play for the Red Sox—there was this one thing we shared. We had, each of us, another parent living in a house away from this one—somebody whose blood ran in our veins. Whatever his real father’s story was, I didn’t know it, but thirteen wasn’t too young to understand that sorrow and regret took many forms.
No doubt Richard’s father, like my mother, had once held his infant son in his arms, looked into the eyes of his child’s mother, and believed they would move into the future together with love. The fact that they didn’t was a weight each of us carried, as every child does, probably, whose parents no longer live under the same roof. Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.
With my father, those first few weeks after I moved back into our old house, I got the feeling he didn’t know wh
at to say to me, and so, more often than not, he said nothing. I knew that papers had been filed, statements made to the court, concerning my mother’s questionable parenting choices, as revealed by recent events, but to his credit he didn’t say a word about any of that to me. The newspapers had said it all anyway.
A few weeks after I moved in with my father and Marjorie—around the time I chose not to try out for either lacrosse or soccer—my father brought up the idea of taking a bike ride together. In some households—I can’t say families, because I didn’t consider us to be one—this might not have seemed like such a big deal, except that in the past, he’d never seemed to acknowledge the existence of any athletic activity in which no score was involved, no trophies awarded, no winners or losers identified.
When I reminded him my bike had been out of commission for almost two years, he suggested it was time to buy me a new one—a mountain bike, twenty-one speeds. And a bike for himself. That weekend, the two of us drove to Vermont—this being the time of year when fall foliage was particularly great—and rode through a bunch of towns together, staying in a motel outside of Saxons River. One good thing about riding a bicycle: you don’t do all that much talking when you’re riding one. Especially on those long Vermont hills.
That night, though, we went out to a diner where they had a prime rib special. For most of the meal, we sat in near silence. But around the time the waitress brought his coffee, something seemed to change in my father. Who he seemed like, in a funny way, was Frank, back at my mother’s house, as the police cars were closing in, with the helicopter overhead, the bullhorns blaring. He was like a man who knew he was running out of time, and it was now or never. A little like Frank, he surrendered then.
What he did actually was he got on a subject we had generally avoided up until then, my mother. Not the part about her not getting a real job, for once, or whether she was mentally stable enough to take care of me, perhaps because from the looks of things it had already been established, she wasn’t. It was their early days together that he spoke of.
You know she was a terrific woman, he said. Funny. Beautiful. You never saw anyone dance like her, north of the Broadway stage.
I just sat there, eating my rice pudding. Picking out the raisins, actually. I didn’t look at him, but I was listening.
That trip we made to California was one of the best times I ever had, he told me. We had so little money, we slept in the car, mostly. But there was this one town we passed through, in Nebraska, where we got a motel room with a kitchenette, and we made spaghetti on the hot plate. We didn’t know a thing about Hollywood was the truth. We were small-town people. But back in her waitress days she’d waited on a woman one time who was one of the June Taylor dancers on Jackie Gleason, who had written down her number and told Adele to look her up if she was ever in L.A. That’s what we were going to do: call the June Taylor dancer. Only when we did that, her son answered the phone. She was in a nursing home by then. Senile, basically. You know what your mother did? We went to visit her. She brought cookies.
I did look up from my bowl then. When I did, his face looked different. I had never thought I looked anything like him—had even wondered, once (in fact, this was a topic of speculation raised by Eleanor), if he was really my father at all, we seemed so different from each other. And he, such an unlikely person to have married my mother. But looking across the diner booth now at this pale, slightly overweight man with his thinning hair and the newly purchased spandex bicycle shirt he’d probably never wear again, I recognized, weirdly, something familiar. I could imagine him being young. I imagined him as that young man my mother had described, who knew just how much pressure to apply to a woman’s back as he moved her across the dance floor, the crazy young man she had trusted to keep her from falling when she executed her three-hundred-and-sixty-degree flip in her red underwear. I could see my own face in his, actually. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes looked moist.
It was losing those babies that did her in, he said. The last one. She never could get over that.
There was still pudding in my bowl, but I had stopped eating now. My father hadn’t touched his coffee either.
A better man might have stayed around to help her through it, he said. But after a while, I couldn’t handle all that sadness. I wanted a regular life. I cut out, basically.
And then Marjorie and I had Chloe. It wasn’t as if doing that erased what happened before, but it was easier for me, not to think about it. Where for your mother, the story never went away.
This was as much as he said about it, and we didn’t revisit the topic again. He paid the bill, and we went back to our motel room. The next morning we rode a little more, but I was realizing by then how totally unnatural a thing it was for my father to be moving along the hills of Vermont by any means other than a minivan. After a couple of hours, when I suggested we call it a day, he didn’t argue. On the way home, I slept, mostly.
I STAYED AT MY FATHER’S HOUSE for most of that seventh-grade year. One good thing: because I was living with my father and Marjorie, there seemed no need to continue our excruciating tradition of Saturday night dinners at Friendly’s. Meals at the house were easier. The television set stayed on, for one thing.
You might have thought my mother would have lobbied hard for visits, but the opposite happened, for a while anyway. She seemed to discourage my coming over, and when I stopped by on the new bike (delivering groceries, and library books, and myself), she would seem busy and distracted.
She had calls to make, she said. Vitamin customers. There were all these chores to be done. She was vague about what the chores could be in a house with no furniture to dust or rugs to vacuum, where no cooking happened, no visitors came by.
She was reading a lot, she said, and it was true. There were books piled up the way the Campbell’s soup used to be. Books about unlikely topics: forestry and animal husbandry, chickens, wildflowers, raised-bed gardening, though our yard remained as bare as ever. Her favorite book, which seemed to be on the kitchen table every time I came by, was one volume, published in the fifties, by a couple named Helen and Scott Nearing, called Living the Good Life—about their experiences, leaving their jobs and home in someplace like Connecticut and moving to rural Maine, where they had grown all their own food and lived without electricity or telephone. In the photographs illustrating the book, Scott Nearing was always pictured wearing overalls or worn-looking blue jeans—a man no longer even middle-aged, bent over a hoe, turning the soil over; his wife in her plaid shirt, hoeing alongside him.
I think my mother must have had that book memorized, she read it so often. All those two had was each other, she said. That was enough.
Maybe there was some guilt involved—the feeling that my mother needed me, and my father didn’t—that brought me to my decision, but the truth is, I think I needed my mother. I missed our conversations over dinner, and the way—unlike Marjorie, who seemed to use a whole other vocal register when talking with anybody under twenty-one years old—she never spoke with me any differently than she would to a person her own age. Though with a few exceptions—the occasional door-to-door solicitor, her MegaMite customers, and the oil-delivery man—the only person she spoke with was me.
By the following spring, when I told my father I wanted to go back and live at my mother’s house, he didn’t argue. The next day, I moved back into our old place.
I tried out for the baseball team. They put me in right field. One time, when we were playing the team Richard was on, I caught a long fly ball he hit, that everyone expected to be a triple. Every time I came up to bat, I had this ritual. See the ball, I said, too softly for even the catcher to hear. More often than you might think, I got a hit.
My mother and I lived, all my high school years, in a house without possessions, more or less. We had a few items of furniture left from that day we thought we were leaving forever, but except for the things we’d put in boxes in the car, we’d given away just about everything, and even of what we�
��d kept, intending to take it with us for our new life up north, we hardly took anything out of the boxes, besides the coffeemaker and a few items of clothing. Not my mother’s wardrobe of dancing outfits, or her amazing shoes and scarves, her fans, or the paintings that used to hang on our walls, or her dulcimer, or her tape player even, though eventually, when I started earning my own money, I bought a Walkman, so I could listen to my music.
The voices of Frank Sinatra and Joni Mitchell and (now I knew his name) Leonard Cohen were no longer heard in our house. No more Guys and Dolls sound track. Or any music. No music, no dancing.
At some point, after it was over, we made a trip to the Goodwill, where my mother bought back just enough plates and forks and cups for the two of us to have our meals, though when you eat frozen dinners and soup most of the time, you don’t need much in the way of dishes. In tenth grade, though, I took a home economics class—they had started opening these kinds of courses up to boys by this point. I discovered I liked to cook, and for some reason, though my mother knew virtually nothing about cooking, I was good at it. One of my specialties, not learned in home economics, was pie.
For most of high school, my father and I continued our tradition of going out to dinner Saturday nights, though when my social life picked up, as it did eventually, we switched to weeknights, and to everyone’s relief, probably, Marjorie stopped accompanying us. I got along well enough with Richard, and I got to enjoy hanging out with my little sister, Chloe, on occasion, but restaurant nights were mostly just my father and me, and at my suggestion, we changed the venue from Friendly’s to a place a little outside of town called Acropolis that served Greek food, which was better, and once, when Marjorie was out of town visiting her sister, I even went over to their house and made a dish I’d seen in a magazine, chicken marsala.
One night, over spanakopita at Acropolis—under the influence of a couple of glasses of red wine—my father tackled the topic of sex, that had remained dormant, more or less, since his first early attempts to fill me in on the facts of life.
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