Bound South

by Susan Rebecca White

  I wonder if I should try and fix Charles up with Chevre.

  CHARLES BRINGS ME a gimlet—in a chilled glass—and we sit in the living room together sipping our drinks. I have a hundred questions I want to ask, but I’m not sure which ones are appropriate and which are not.

  “Maybe,” I say, “your father and I can go to a PFLAG meeting.”

  Charles barks out a laugh. “Puh-flag,” he says. “I’m beginning to like the sound of that.”

  As usual, I am on the outside of one of Charle’s inside jokes, an inside joke he has with himself.

  “You can go if you want,” says Charles. “It will probably just be a bunch of mothers crying because their butch daughters refuse to be debutantes.”

  He’s probably right. Bootsey Brook’s daughter, Sally, shaved off all her hair after her first year at Hollins and brought some girl who looks just like a twelve-year-old boy home for Christmas break. Not that Bootsey went running off to a PFLAG meeting. She just insisted—even though Bootsey’s house has countless bedrooms in it—that Sally and her “friend” stay at a hotel.

  I take another sip of my gimlet. Charles must have stuck the martini glasses he’s using into the freezer. It is frosty. The gimlet tastes more of gin than anything, but it’s nice and cold and with every sip I feel more comfortable sitting here with him.

  “I just have one question, sweetheart.” (A lie. I have a thousand questions.) “Why did you decide you had to tell us this weekend? Why drive home so suddenly?”

  Charles presses his lips together. “Do you want the truth or something more palatable?” he asks.

  Oh Lord.

  “I want the truth, of course,” I say, not sure if I really do.

  “I dropped out of school. I’m not going back to Chapel Hill.”

  I have no idea what to say to that. I am shocked, obviously. He can’t drop out of school. I mean, is he even allowed to do that without our permission? I take a good long sip of my drink.

  “Look,” says Charles, talking fast. “It wasn’t working for me, it really wasn’t. Chapel Hill is cute but face it, it’s a backwater. The big thing to do on the weekends is to go to frat parties and watch white kids dry hump to hip-hop.”

  It’s funny to hear him say that: “dry hump.” We used that term when we were in college, although it’s certainly not something I would have said in front of my parents.

  “Charles, you were only there for a semester and a half. I’m sure there are other groups besides the fraternities.”

  “Okay, let’s see. There are the environmentalists who seem to think that having body odor equals a political movement, there are the freaks from Campus Crusade for Christ, and of course there are oodles of good moderate North Carolinians who bore me to tears anytime they open their mouths,” he says.

  “Darling, you sound very judgmental.”

  “Well there’s a lot of judgment out there against gay men. Especially in the South.”

  “But you’re not a man!” I say.

  Charles puts a finger to his cheek. “And I wonder why he went queer,” he says, as if he is at a cocktail party talking about himself.

  “Your father is going to kill you,” I say.

  “No, he’ll just ignore and belittle me.”

  Well, that was correct. At least his brain is still functioning in some sort of realistic manner.

  “He’s not going to give you any money.”

  “I haven’t asked for any,” says Charles.

  I keep my mouth shut, but I’m thinking, You will.

  “Look,” he says. “I’ve talked to Caroline. She told me that I could sleep on their couch for as long as I want. So all I’m going to need is a plane ticket to San Francisco.”

  “Caroline knows about this?”

  Charles nods.

  “And her newfound religious leanings don’t—you know—conflict with your…with who you are?”

  “I don’t see how they could considering she lives in a city chock full of fags.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that word,” I say.

  “Oh Louise,” says Charles. He drains the rest of his gimlet. “You’re priceless.”

  Who would have thought that I would raise a born-again daughter (although I’m assuming this phase of Caroline’s will soon pass; she’s certainly gone through stages before) and a gay son? To be perfectly honest, I prefer the gay son. Or rather, I think I’ll be more comfortable with a gay son. I just don’t know what to say to Caroline when she starts talking about God. When she confesses as she did one time on the phone—I think she might have had too much to drink—that Christ is with her, always guiding her choices if she takes the time to “discern his presence.” I suppose I should try and take joy in her joy. (Although she doesn’t seem joyful. She seems burdened.) I just find her religious language a little, well, embarrassing.

  “Oh dear,” I say, looking in my martini glass. “I guess all my children are leaving me.”

  “It’s not you I’m leaving,” says Charles. “It’s the Confederacy.”

  How he can say that when we are sitting in the middle of Ansley Park, the border of Midtown, the gayest place in the South, I will never know.

  I suppose he has a natural tendency toward the dramatic.

  AND WHAT ABOUT my husband? What of him? Does he even want to know of Charles’s big plans to be a college dropout sleeping on his God-obsessed sister’s sofa in San Francisco? Should I even bother to pass on that information? I suppose at some point he’ll notice that he’s stopped receiving tuition bills from Chapel Hill. I suppose then he might make an inquiry or two as to the whereabouts of his son.

  Oh Lord. It’s just going to be John Henry and me and Nanny Rose around Atlanta. Now that Tiny’s divorce is finalized she has moved to Sea Island for good. Not that it really even matters. All she wants to talk about anymore is the huge settlement her lawyer got for her. (She threatened to reveal all of Anders’s misallocation of firm funds—including the personal use of Jose—if Anders didn’t give her half of his future earnings. Anders, knowing he was beat, acquiesced.) That or Ray, her forty-two-year-old boyfriend, who I swear uses self-tanner (or else why would his skin be so orange?).

  I am going to wind up old and alone, my only accomplishment that I drove my children as far from Atlanta as possible and stayed married to a man who is incapable of feeling one iota of sympathy for his own flesh and blood. Why have I not made more of my life? If I had married Ben Ascher instead of John Henry, maybe things would be different. Maybe I would have had a thriving and stimulating marriage instead of this thing—this stale compromise—that John Henry and I have come up with (except for sex, we’ve always been good in that department); maybe my children wouldn’t have felt the need to adopt such extreme personalities, to move such extreme distances away from me.

  After Charles finishes his drink and leaves the house for God knows where, I walk around looking at all my pretty things. The carved wooden bowls by Philip Moulthrop, the piece of Tiffany stained glass above the round window in the hallway, the George the Second mahogany dining room chairs, and all our gorgeous hand-knotted rugs. These things bring me comfort, I swear to God they do.

  JOHN HENRY IS already in our bed, under the covers. The lamp on my bedside table has been turned on, a thoughtful gesture on his part, not that I really want to feel appreciative toward him at this particular moment. I lie down on top of the covers, near him but not touching. We have not talked since he left the living room after Charles’s revelation, hours ago.

  “I wish you could have given him more,” I say, knowing he is still awake.

  I hear John Henry sigh beside me. Everything seems softer in bed, quieter.

  “I did the best I could,” he says, opening his eyes. “Believe me, if I had told my father what Charles told me, he wouldn’t have reacted as calmly as I did.”

  “Did Wallace ever tell your father?” I ask.

  I can feel John Henry’s muscles tighten, the way they always do when I bring
up Wallace.

  “We don’t know for sure about him,” he says.

  “We know what was in his apartment in Athens,” I say. “When we went down there to pack up his stuff.”

  “I’ve got to get some sleep,” says John Henry. “I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

  My heart is pushing against my chest. I want to talk about this. I want to talk about Wallace. I want to talk about the thing we never talk about on the rare occasions when we do actually talk about him.

  “He was such a sweet man,” I say. “Do you remember how he always brought me flowers for my hair? Every single time we went out with him? Do you remember how he used to throw his head back and laugh when someone told a joke, how he just gave over to it completely?”

  “He was always more outgoing than I was,” says John Henry.

  “You were outgoing. After a few drinks.”

  “Thanks.”

  I turn on my side and smile at him, just to let him know I was teasing. He smiles back.

  “Do you think Wallace would have shot himself if he could have lived an openly gay life like he could now?”

  My husband is no longer smiling. He sits up, looming over me, his eyes cold.

  “Louise, I don’t know why you’re insisting on that interpretation of him. It’s like you are obsessed.”

  This is as far as we ever get. This is where John Henry raises his voice and I back off because God knows I don’t want to cause John Henry further grief. Wallace, after all, was his brother, his identical twin.

  “Darling,” I say, sitting up so I can be at eye level with him again. “Those magazines in his room, his diary for God’s sake. He couldn’t have been more explicit if he had spelled it out in a suicide note.”

  John Henry is silent and then I hear a gasp and he is crying hard just for a moment before he stops, the expression on his face returning to impassivity.

  I surprise myself by feeling sorry for him. It is as if I feel my heart plumping after scrunching itself so tight against him. I place my hand on his chest, over his heart.

  “His suicide was not our fault,” I say. “We gave Wallace a lot of love. But we can do better by our son.”

  “You don’t know that,” he says.

  “We can do better by our son.”

  “You don’t know it wasn’t our fault. My fault. Wallace’s suicide.”

  “Oh darling,” I say. I rub his forearm. “You know, even if he was gay, most likely that wasn’t what made him kill himself. Most likely he had some sort of chemical imbalance. I mean, think about my mother. Think about how much better she was once the doctors finally discovered Prozac.”

  It breaks my heart, still. To think that my mother had a treatable form of mental illness, to think that she didn’t have to spend all that time at those hospitals, having electric shock treatments and sitting around in a housecoat playing bingo with other crazy rich ladies.

  John Henry whispers something.

  “What?”

  “I said it was my fault about Wallace.”

  “Of course it wasn’t your fault,” I say.

  “The week before he killed himself Wallace visited me at Chapel Hill and told me he might be a homosexual.”

  Not once have I ever heard John Henry even mention the idea that his brother might be gay. Not once in our thirty years of marriage. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t even know that Wallace visited our senior year. I don’t remember him ever having done so.

  As if he can read my mind, John Henry says, “It was during that break we took, when we dated other people. Before I came to my senses.”

  It’s funny. I’ve told that story so many times the way I wished it had happened that even John Henry believes it. He’s probably forgotten the real details. He’s probably forgotten that we got back together the night of Wallace’s death. He probably thinks it happened just like I told Caroline, at a football game one afternoon when he was drunk as a skunk. Lord knows he doesn’t dwell on the time around Wallace’s suicide.

  How strange to think of Wallace, with whom I was always so close, running around Chapel Hill without making plans to see me. It is ridiculous I know, but I feel hurt all these years later. I wonder if Wallace didn’t want to see me or if John Henry instructed him not to.

  “I can’t believe he admitted that to you.”

  “He was depressed. He talked about breaking up with Heather.”

  “My God, I’d forgotten about her. Do you remember how irritating she was with her baby talk?”

  John Henry continues talking, as if I hadn’t said anything. It’s not that he’s being rude exactly, more like he’s on a mission, a soldier carrying out an order.

  “We’d been at Phi Delt for most of the night, just playing cards and drinking. Around two a.m. we headed back to our apartment, cutting through campus to get to Franklin Street. There was hardly anyone on the main quad, just an occasional couple that would pass by. That was when he told me that he was thinking about breaking up with Heather. He wasn’t attracted to her. They had tried to have sex—several times—and it hadn’t ever worked.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He told me he didn’t think he was attracted to girls.”

  God, I can see them. Wallace and John Henry walking across campus together, Wallace’s shoulders hunched the way they always were when he was upset. John Henry wearing a T-shirt, maybe even wearing it inside out the way he would when he’d forgotten to do laundry. The tall trees of the campus making a canopy above them, not that either of them would have looked up, not during such a confession.

  “What did you say?” I asked. “What did you say when he told you he wasn’t attracted to girls?”

  John Henry is silent for so long I begin to think he did not hear me. Just as I am about to ask again, he says, “I tried to make a joke. I told him that there were no fags allowed on campus after sunset.”

  Apparently there used to be signs that said that, outside small southern towns. Except it wasn’t fags they were warning, but black people. “Niggers” the signs would say.

  “What happened?” I asked. “After you said that, what did he say?”

  John Henry covers his face with his hands. I stare at his wedding ring, thinking of how startling it was to see it on his finger those first few months of our marriage. How shiny it was back then.

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “For God’s sake, John Henry, just go ahead and tell me. What did he say when you told him that fags weren’t allowed on campus after sunset?”

  John Henry lowers his hands from his face. He sighs, defeated.

  “He didn’t say anything so I kept talking. I told him that there were a million girls he could date, that he just must not have been dating his type. I told him that I could set him up with any girl on campus, that he could come up any weekend and I’d have a sure thing for him, and he interrupted me and said that he was a homosexual.”

  Oh my God. Poor Wallace.

  “So I told him that he needed to do whatever he had to do to get over it because you couldn’t be a Parker and a fag. And then he started shouting at me that he was a Parker and he was a faggot. I told him to shut the hell up but he kept yelling it, kept yelling, ‘I’m a goddamn Parker and I’m a goddamn faggot.’ He wouldn’t stop yelling, Louise. He wouldn’t shut up. And then I saw two guys from Phi Delt stumbling across campus toward us and I sort of lunged at Wallace just to shut him up. I knocked him to the ground and I put my knee on his chest and I looked down at him below me, half expecting him to be crying, half wanting him to be crying so I could knock the shit out of him for it, but he wasn’t. He was just staring up at me with this strange look on his face, like I wasn’t even there. Like I didn’t even exist.”

  I wonder where Wallace was at that moment.

  “Did you knock the shit out of him?”

  “No. I didn’t. I stood, gave him a hand to help him up, though he didn’t take it. I said somet
hing about us being drunk and it being late and why don’t we go home and sleep it off. And he sort of waved me away, said he’d meet up with me later, back at the apartment. But he must have had his car keys on him because he didn’t come back to my place that night or the next day. I didn’t talk to him that week but I knew he was back in Athens because he had called Mother from there to tell her he loved her. She called to tell me that, like it was the most wonderful thing in the world that Wallace had done so. She thought it meant he forgave her for having sent him to military school after he got kicked out of Fox Hill.”

  His face crumples and he is crying hard again. This time I think he will keep crying. This time I think he might not ever stop.

  Perhaps I should hate my husband for the story he has told me, but I don’t. I feel—I feel sad for him and sad for Wallace. Sorry for them both. What has holding this in done to his spirit all these years? I wrap my arms around him and he grabs onto me, crying into my neck, his tears wetting my skin and my hair. It is like the night he came to tell me of Wallace’s death.

  And as I hold my husband I am floating back in time, back before Wallace shot himself, back before I met Ben Ascher, back before John Henry tried to end things between us our senior year. Back to that first sweet summer after we started dating, when John Henry looked at me like a man in love and Wallace brought flowers for my hair. We were all in Atlanta. We would spend most days at the Driving Club, swimming. My body was sleek and taut, John Henry’s nearly hairless and tan. He would sit in a lounge chair and watch me dive from the high board, his eyes trained on me even as I pulled myself out of the pool.

  Afterwards we would play tennis, or rather, John Henry and Wallace would play. Occasionally we would find a partner for me and play doubles, but mostly, I watched. I didn’t mind.

  They were perfectly matched, those two, in their tennis whites. Wallace had such a powerful serve, his body a straight line just before he drove the ball over the net. And there was John Henry, eyes focused, feet nimble, whacking it back to his brother. It seemed sometimes that they would go for hours before either of them lost the point.