Changes of Heart

by Patricia Ryan

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  ALL OUR LOVE

  I.

  Some people’s lives are like the north side of a tree. There is very little else that reaches there except shade, moss, and wind. Any light there may be is reflected.

  This condition is permanent, except perhaps for drastic measures, such as uprooting the tree or turning the earth.

  One wonders, if like the tree, people really have any choice in this condition, although of course, we say they do.

  No matter. Johnny’s life was not like that.

  “This is my father,” he said, taking a step away from the suitcase on the bed and showing the photo to Linda.

  He had never done this before: prepare for his first visit home. He had never gone back to them from his new life, and it had its own anticipatory pleasure.

  “This is my father and this is my sister,” he said, pointing to a jovial man whose arms surrounded a teen-age girl in a mock air of affectionate captivity. The photo was obviously taken in the summer at a lake. Both were in bathing suits at the edge of a dock.

  “My brother took this picture before he pushed them both in the water” he laughed. “We should have had a picture of that!”

  Linda looked diplomatically at the photo. She was somewhat enlightened by it, as it provided a small physical reality to some of the things he had told her. But she was mostly indifferent to its one-dimensionality.

  He took the picture with unconscious gentleness and put it back in the album he would pack.

  “My mother wasn’t with us that day,” he started to explain. “She had to take my other brother to the only dentist in town, after he broke his tooth wrestling with my father on the lawn! We were always doing something like that. Never a dull moment!”

  It amazed Linda that he didn’t seem to have any sense of not being part of that family. She found it, well, unrealistic that he should persist in his uncritical adoration. First, because, to all college freshmen, families seemed to be merely a toleration now that they were on their own.

  And second, because they weren’t his family.

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  II.

  Johnny came to live with them every summer when he was nine, and sometimes in between, or even he might miss a year.

  Who knows why they wanted him, for god’s sake.

  From what he told Linda, he was a mean, conniving kid, given to hiding things, thoughts, anything.

  If one of them called out to him, he wouldn’t answer them on purpose, and sometimes if they touched him he would jerk away, pretending disgust.

  He told her these things to show her from what point of departure they eventually, with their horseplay and loud frivolity drew him in. It seemed there was always room in the group din for one more, and he didn’t have to risk, as none of them did, the failure of the direct. Each could get lost in the noise and the chaos, or just cascade along and splash in it in his or her own way, to be noticed or hide as needed.

  What Linda especially didn’t understand was how he managed to ignore that other part of his life, the part that had also gone on day after day, hour after hour. All those months and years when he wasn’t with them. It was as though he cancelled the significance of that time.

  However, he lived it; he was there.

  He had cancelled it the same way one might erase the time waiting at an airport or in traffic or other times of passage to the real event, even though as time itself it was as real as any other.

  He began to tell her these important things after the first time they had made love, to match with words the significance of this event.

  He told her he was officially considered a foster child; that is, his real parents were alive and would not give him up. Which was why his “family” never adopted him, he believed, although it never really became a big discussion that he knew of.

  He told her, that because his parents were often very sick (“I knew later they were alcoholics.”), he went to school in a big brick building where he also slept and ate. Except when he went to his grandfather’s on some weekends. His grandfather liked to see him but kept forgetting to have meals or even to let him back into the house.

  Sometimes his mother and father would return from their hospitals and take a room and keep him for a week, or whatever. Most of the why and when and with whom and for how long blurred into a long grey moment without action in his memory, he told Linda.

  After all, his “family” was what really happened.

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  III.

  He continued to pack. There was resolution, enjoyment in his movements, as if the reunion were beginning here.

  “They’re fantastic,” he said to Linda. “I wonder what tricks everyone has cooked up this time.”

  “Aren’t they too old for all that by now,” Linda said, then added, “So, what have you got ‘cooked up’ for them?”

  Johnny may have frowned slightly. And if he did, it wasn’t clear if it was because of Linda’s tone, or because he was seriously thinking.

  “Nothing, really,” he said. “I get a big kick just being an accomplice. They’re so good at it, and have been doing it for so long. Actually, I’m just wondering what they plan to pull on me!”

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  IV.

  “Roger,” Midgee said. “Roger, dear.”

  Roger appeared in the bathroom doorway. Midgee was mostly dressed, but seemed disorganized about going any further. “Roger, dear,” she said. “What shall we do with Johnny this year? You know that Peggy is bringing a friend from school; Bill is coming with Carrie and the baby; and Roger Jr. is already sleeping in the den.

  Should we get the cot from the Farrell’s and put it in with Roger, or do you think you should move some of that stuff in the basement and we’ll put him there?”

  “Johnny?” Roger said. “Johnny’s coming? You didn’t say anything about Johnny coming.”

  “Oh? Well, I thought I did. Anyway, yes, he’s coming. When he called from school to say ‘Merry Christmas’ and asked what we were all doing over the holidays, and well, I told him. I had to ask him too.”

  “Yes.” Roger said. “Well, I guess I’d better get the basement ready. Young Roger will have a fit if he has to sleep in the den and share it too.”

  About Johnny they more or less understood each other.

  When he first came to them, it had been, of course, a good idea. All of them believed that one more child could extend their youthful frivolity and keep it going at a time when it seemed the natural passage of time would threaten to bring it to a halt.

  What could be better to mute the hollowness of space left by children growing up, than the unquestionably good move to bring in another child, someone who could absorb all the empty excess so they wouldn’t have to hear the future echo back.

  But Johnny was not frivolous.

  They wanted validation by the act of being joined, and instead they got a non-reflecting mirror that made them feel nearly invisible.

  They could not accept this perceived failure, and set about to change it. They cajoled, bribed and courted Johnny until he believed there was something of value in himself, instead of what he really was: a kind of capitulated applause. He came to be the eager echo they needed but underneath they resented the work.

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  V.

  Linda was sorry Johnny was going home. She had hoped they would stay at school during the holidays, making for themselves a kind of a vacation on the quiet campus together. They could do all the things they never had time for, get to know each other better by shifting the usual patterns and pressures of the school year, and leisurely enjoy the nearby town and the snowy beauty of the grounds.

  Johnny had not said that he would be staying at school, but since no one had invited him anywhere until he called Midgee, she thought it might just happen that way.

  Linda was disappointed, but not hurt. While they were drawn to each other, their mutually shattered, ungrounded lives did not
give either of them the easy ability to stand irrevocably tight with another person.

  She would go to her sister’s, and if she had to be without Johnny, she would even enjoy the change. But she was a bit worried: these seemingly untempered emotions Johnny had in regard to this family felt dangerous and out of character. Frankly, in their regard she thought he depended too much on too little, even if this little was the most he had ever seen.

  She thought with a better sense of reality he could make choices; with this fantasy he would make mistakes.

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  VI.

  Midgee was glad to see Johnny. After all he had been her justifiable way of being a little unfaithful to her children. Some small proof that they did not own her at a time when she wanted to continue to own them, and they could not continue to let her.

  Nor was Roger totally displeased. They greeted each other as though Johnny were some sort of ex-beau of an imaginary daughter, who managed to stay friends with the family after the daughter was long gone. There was that same common sharing of things past, even though the point of it all had been outlived.

  They more or less liked Johnny for himself anyway. But not entirely; his difficult and neglected beginning had left him unrobust. His stature was small and seemed to them, given the exaggerated physicality of their own lives, a spiteful unfullfillment. Bad nutrition had done not only that, but also given him mean teeth. He looked a little like a movie punk. Or a real punk, in as much as real punks often had similar beginnings.

  But Midgee had stopped whatever process in the latter direction might have taken place. She was, at that time, interested in him. The momentum of her caring for the other three went forward and included him as well. He was glad to have it.

  Roger never quite knew what to do with Johnny. But fathers often don’t, and this seemed to be allowed. So no one ever noticed that Roger didn’t really love Johnny. But accepting him seemed to be the same thing.

  Over the years, those whom Johnny considered to be his brothers and sister had changeable and often contradictory feelings about him, as in fact they had about each other. But mostly they let Johnny be the backdrop, the straight man, the Maypole, to their changing personalities.

  They could test their ever-new selves on Johnny each time he reappeared in their lives, as one could on a stranger because they did not really value his judgment. Therefore, they shared everything of themselves with him, but they were not interested in accepting much of him in return. And since he never gave it because he cared greatly about their judgment, they all thought they loved each other very much.

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  VII.

  “I can’t believe I’m home!” Johnny said warmly once they had greeted each other and gotten his suitcase settled in the basement.

  “From what I can tell,” Roger seemed to jest, “most kids your age think college is home, and home is now a place to be avoided.”

  “Not me,” Johnny said, purposely not wondering why of all the things that could have been said, Roger would have said that.

  “Well, but you do like school, don’t you dear?” Midgee asked.

  “I love it,” Johnny said.

  He expanded himself on the couch, crossing one leg over the other and spreading both arms out over the couch back. He was in a state of delight with their both coming to sit and talk with him. He told them about his room at school, about classes; told them he was learning things he had never thought about before, and that this confused him even further as to what he wanted to study seriously.

  “Everything!” he said.

  “My dear, you’ll be a student all your life,” Midgee said.

  As time went on, the conversation, the room, the way they were sitting in separate places, took on an air Johnny had never sensed before. It was as though he had previously been let free, perhaps dismissed, and was now participating in the required run down of recent events that artificially-induced reunions, such as those with ex-classmates, ex-coworkers, ex-lovers, often engage in.

  Some of him was naturally estranged. Part of his becoming an adult, and how hard he had fought on his own to get there. But what he was feeling was not his estrangement; on the contrary, he wanted to hold on to this past part of himself, and always, each time, to reconstruct it. He began to get the feeling, however, that this time he was moving underwater, things slipped and missed and had no substance.

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  VIII.

  When everyone else arrived it became noisy and busy. They were all really very glad to see each other.

  The several days went by like a cruise. There was always a new group, some new combination, wandering in and out of the kitchen, the den, the living room. And there were events. Presents under the tree, the big Christmas dinner, drop-ins and cocktails with the neighbors, the T.V. specials they all watched together.

  All in all Johnny was nearly very happy.

  They didn’t do it on purpose, of course, but he noticed that they spoke to him directly when he was the only other person in the room. If they were all together they watched Carrie or young Roger or Bill speak. No matter what they were saying, and no matter what he was saying, they waited tolerantly until Johnny was finished and then addressed each other again.

  Sometimes he would say something provocative that they liked and they would take it from him and work on it with each other. They showed that they were pleased to be with each other, even with him, but somehow their eyes always strayed from Johnny to somebody else.

  He realized this wasn’t very different from what it had ever been before, but now Johnny’s ability to understand what he saw was changed. He had already been with other people---his roommate, Linda, various classmates --whose eyes did not wander. Some of them may have liked Johnny or not; no matter, their eyes did not wander, they did not talk to someone else when they answered him.

  Johnny began to be able to tell that his “family” cared about him, but that they didn’t love him. They had always cared about him, but they had never loved him.

  There was no particular reason they didn’t love him: this is the way it was, regardless of the way it could be.

  In addition to not loving him, Johnny no longer served them. Whatever their need had been for him, they had already gotten past it, and were on their own now, separate even from each other.

  By the time the holiday was over and they were all ready to go, and were saying goodbye, with hugs and sincere promises to get together more often during the year, he was quietly in shock.

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  IX.

  When Linda saw the set of his face she knew it was not a bad mood, or even annoyance. Although he showed no pleasure in seeing her, she knew he was not upset with her.

  Instead, it was the face of change that comes from sour information. Soldiers often have it; as do those divorced, and many who live in cities for a long time. Johnny’s face kept that same set, with eyes that looked at everything so hard they went beyond what they were seeing, for the rest of the semester.

  When he and Linda were together he wasn’t just distracted, he also put limits on what could happen between them. He kept their conversations to the events around them: exams, the yearly rumor of grade scandals, housing for the next term. He told her his visit home had been “fine.” He avoided any real physical contact with her, and began to reduce the amount of time they spent together. His roommate told her that Johnny studied and read when he was in the room, but that he was hardly ever in the room.

  Linda tried to change his attitude, but she couldn’t. She tried to understand it as well, but it was impossible since he gave her no clue, and she had wasted time at first believing him when he said it was “exams,” and she thought it would cure itself when tests were over.

  The next term Johnny went into the Coast Guard and never came back. He had told her two days before he left that he was going, and she was so angry and helpless at the way he had cut her off without warning that she didn’t
even want to hear why, and so she didn’t ask him.

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  “My dearest Linda,” Johnny’s letter began. When he finally felt the need to talk to the only person he knew who would listen, even from afar, he told her that before he quit school he had been sad, incredibly sad, and did not know how to explain it to her. He said he still couldn’t explain why he should be one of those people who have never been sufficiently loved.

  “I shouldn’t say ‘not loved,” he continued, after recounting the events of his holiday visit, “Because I know that some of what happened to me has been a kind of love.

  “I was terribly angry at first. I wanted to stomp away from them, to tell them ‘the hell with you. I’ll replace you all with someone else.’

  “Well, I can’t. This is what my life was. I have no options on the past. I realize I am unloved only if I overthrow what I already have. It is not all I could have, or maybe should have. But I’ll keep it, and the rest I’ll have to get for myself.”

  Linda often wondered if he did.