Child of My Right Hand (3 page)

On the twenty-five-inch screen, all obstacles to wedded bliss had been overcome. Spencer was giving Liz away. It was oh so sweet and schmaltzy. The wedding march played. Jack could feel a lump blocking the back of his throat, for there she was on her screen father's arm, Liz Taylor in a perfect white dress with eyelet lace. Simon said, and though he spoke softly, Jack could hear the grief in his voice, “There's only going to be one real wedding in our family.”

Genna and Jack eyed each other. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Lizzie will get married someday.” Simon hesitated, while on the screen Spencer passed his daughter to the man who loved her. “But I can't.”

In his wife's eyes Jack read fear and sadness, and he hoped, as he knew Genna was hoping, that Simon would find the courage to go on.

“Why not?”

“Because I'm gay.”

He'd finally said it and Jack didn't know whether to cheer or cry or what. It wasn't much of a surprise, no surprise at all, except that Simon had found the courage to tell them. But what to say? Hooray? Oh, shit? We already knew?

“Gay is good,” Genna said. “We love you the same as ever.”

“Of course,” Jack chimed in to be able to say something.

Liz kissed her bridegroom. The soundtrack swelled. Jack's eyes fluttered wet, and he wanted to say something more. “Maybe someday there could be a ceremony where you”—he searched for the right word—“and your partner could each step on a glass.”

He tried to imagine Simon under a chupa kissing a guy, but couldn't bring it to mind.

Simon might have said, You guys are great. Or, What if the guy's not Jewish? Instead he responded, “I'm really tired, I'm going to bed.” Then he stood and all two hundred and thirty ordinarily surly pounds of him advanced towards the bedroom corridor he shared with Lizzie. Near the door, he turned and smiled his little-boy smile.

Late that night, after Lizzie was home and asleep in her bed, Jack and Genna made love for only the second time in their new house. They'd been tiptoeing around that, too. The moon shone through the picture window onto their bed, lighting Genna's face and the hollow between her breasts. The strange bird they'd been hearing since they moved in gave its odd whooping cry. Who-whoo, Who-weee, Who-whoo, who-weee.

“It's great he could tell us,” Genna whispered. “Don't you think?”

Jack nodded.

“It means we've done something right, don't you think?”

She snuggled backwards against him. Jack crossed his arm over her breasts, and they spooned as they had when their path through the world seemed simpler. And in the woods outside their room the bird repeated its eerie cry: Who-whoo, Who-weee. Who-who, who-weee.

Simon was in love or maybe in lust. Hit me from the top, hit me from the bottom, Don't mean nothing, less it's right between the eyes. Rich was a sophomore, fifteen years old. He had curly black hair and lived with his father in the trailer park outside town. Simon had met Rich through his new best friend Rachel. He totally loved Rachel, who lived with her mother and a little wiener dog. She was fine with the gay thing because her mother was gay, which was a secret Simon had promised not to tell anyone.

Rachel had light brown hair, with blonde highlights, that flipped up at the ends, which was what Simon had looked like when he was two and three. Medium height, the tiniest bit plump, smart and popular. She could sit at anyone's table, but she sat with him. Just last Friday he sat down, and Rachel said, “Simon, meet my friend, Rich.”

Now, less than a week later, they were walking away from the auditeria, Simon and Rich, Rachel, her friend Ellyn and Ellyn's boyfriend, Rob. Whenever he felt bored during French (the whole freaking time), Simon worked on the note. He'd planned to pass it at lunch, but someone was always watching.

Rich,

I think your cool. I think your hot. Isn't that weird, your cool and hot?

I'd really like us to get together. I think you know what I mean. In case you don't, I bet you have a really nice cock.

Call me. 773-2920.

Simon

He'd outlined Rich in three shades of red and folded the note in a tight, hot square. Now Rachel was saying something to Ellyn, who was thin and pretty but laughed like a donkey. Just as Rich glanced over his shoulder at Hee-Haw Ellyn, Simon pressed the note in his hand and held on. Rich's head swiveled and his eyes locked on Simon. For that magic moment—can't you just hear it?—they walked down the hall holding hands gazing into each other's eyes. Simon didn't care if anyone noticed; he only cared that Rich took the note. Then Rich felt it and moved his hand away.

“Read it later,” Simon whispered.

Rich put the note in his front pocket near you know what. With his heart singing a love song, an aria like his vocal coach Yevgeny was teaching him, Simon headed for English, where he'd be bored witless, but he wouldn't notice, he wouldn't even care.

***

Rich called that night. Simon locked his door and they talked for an hour. Tomorrow was only Wednesday but they made weekend plans. Simon wanted to invite Rich over so they could be alone. But if his parents weren't home, how could Rich arrive? If Simon's parents were home, would they allow Rich in his bedroom? They had this rule, no girls in his room, but guys could sleep over, which is how he learned the little he knew about sex. (Someday he'd tell Mom a thing or two about Mark, the son of her old friend, Robin, that would make her hair stand on end! But Mark was just a cock-tease.) They had a similar rule for Lizzie: no boys, not even mixed groups, in her bedroom.

Now that he'd come out to his parents, which he still couldn't believe, he wondered if they'd make a rule he couldn't have guys in his bedroom even with the door open? That would totally suck, but Simon consoled himself that he knew how to get around his parents' rules. Rich said he could maybe come over to his dad's trailer, but Simon worried the other trailer-park people would find out and beat them up.

Simon told Rich he'd work on getting his parents to drive him. Then it was time for
Buffy
and
Angel
, his two favorite shows except for
Charmed
. When Mom heard the television, she called down, “Simon, have you finished your homework?”

Finished? He couldn't remember if he had homework. But these were his favorite shows, and even if he had work, he could do it before bed, or in study hall tomorrow. He answered, “Yes, Mom,” and tried to sound really annoyed, like How could she be insulting enough to ask that!

Lizzie watched with him, which he liked, as long as he controlled the remote. Afterwards, he was too tired to check his assignment book. In the morning, during first bell study hall, he wrote Rich a long note in which he described, in some detail, what he'd like to do to that very nice cock he was sure Rich had, and how skilled and experienced he was. (So he exaggerated.) He was, therefore, completely surprised by and unprepared for the pre-calculus test third bell and the French quiz during fourth. He could guess what his grades would be. Between F and F minus, if that were possible, but he couldn't think about that, not even when he sat in French staring at the unfathomable quiz. No, he thought about Rich's curly hair and his cat-like eyes and the note he had to give him; how soon the bell would ring and who would be at lunch, what jokes they'd tell; if Rich would sit next to him and would he like the new long sleeve button down purple shirt Simon was wearing, and would he smile when Simon put the note in his hand and whispered, “Read it later, when you're alone.”

***

Sunday night Jack was scheduled to give his first talk, in Sturtevant, a university dorm. Because he'd always enjoyed research, and because at that time he was having to admit that his longstanding project on Nazi eugenics was going nowhere, that he'd been scooped, and he was either going to have to rethink or give it up entirely, he was avoiding his own work and spent the week researching the history of the Tipton school district. Geographically, Tipton was the largest district in Ohio, most of it rolling farmland. In the old days, before the rural and Tipton-city schools were unified, test scores in Tipton were ten percentage points higher than in the rural schools, where each spring and fall farm kids were excused to help with planting and harvest. In the city, there was a significant percentage of staff and faculty families, with the staff, confronted daily by the relatively luxurious faculty jobs, resolving to use education to help their brood advance. Then there were the faculty, who not only prodded their kids to become more successful versions of themselves, there was the politically uncomfortable matter of genetics. Some kids inherited the good genes; others were shit out of luck. Smart kids and dummies, cradle to grave, despite good intentions, where good intentions even existed. What a horrible, retro notion, throwing Nurture out with the developmental bath water.

Did Jack believe it? No. But he had devoted several years to the study of Nazi eugenics, and its relation to American racism in the 1920s and '30s, discovering, but just as another scholar in the field was beginning to publish, that beginning with neighboring Indiana in 1907, thirty states had passed forced sterilization laws, and that these laws were cited by Nazi race scientists as justification for their own theories. The constitutionality of the American laws, which led to fifty thousand sterilizations, had been upheld in 1927 in
Buck v. Bell
. In a majority opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the court declared, “It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

In other words, the court argued that hypothetical persons were presumed guilty of criminal intent even before being conceived, and may not, therefore, be brought into existence. All of this had proceeded, as a sort of nightmare spawn, out of the general Galtian principle that society ought to encourage the genetically superior to increase their numbers and thereby improve the race and culture. There was no doubt certain traits could be genetically selected. Height, for example, probably speed. But intelligence? A heightened moral sense? Jack sometimes thought, but it wasn't the sort of opinion you committed to paper if you wanted to publish, that what most outraged Jewish critics of Nazi racial profiling, was just how wrong they'd gotten it. How could Yahweh's chosen people, linked by blood, with a tradition of intellectual achievement, be lumped with the lower races? What sort of wrong-headed science was that? Answer: science at the service of a political agenda.

Here in Tipton, one population pole was faculty brats, eighteen years and out, with a genetic predisposition to abstract thought. Across the genetic divide dwelled the farm kids, the product of several generations of natural selection which valued manual labor. Then there was Simon, genetically programmed to sing like an angel.

Jack had discovered that the first year after the districts merged, test scores rose for everyone. Maybe it was the synergy of the joined enterprise, the sharing of staff and curricular materials between the elementary schools. During the fall of the second year, however, the central board voted to close the rural schools and to bus kids to the newer and soon-to-be enlarged elementary buildings in Tipton. Test scores rose the second and third years, but once the kids had been moved, fell sharply in the fourth and fifth years, before settling during the sixth at new and unacceptably low levels, where they remained. Working from enrollment figures and test scores he found at the old Tipton Board of Ed. building, Jack determined that by the end of the sixth year, first and fourth grade reading and math scores were 15 percent lower than what the weighted averages had previously been. Not only had the “better” district failed, as promised, to elevate scores in the lesser district, test scores across both groups actually declined.

Was there something poisonous in the shared air, which had yielded a sum less than its parts? Jack shifted his research from the Board of Ed. to the morgue of Tipton's lone weekly, the
Tipton Gazette
. Paging through the oversize, black leather ledgers for 1988 (the year the last levy passed and the school districts merged) to 1991 (when the board voted to close the rural schools) to 1993 (the second year of the steep decline and the year before they'd arrived in Ohio), he found it. Maybe it wasn't the only it, but IT leapt out at him. Nestled between ads for spiral-sliced hams and Easter lilies in the first week of April, 1991, there was a small article: Klan to March in Tipton. The following week, there was a slightly larger article, lamenting permits the Klan had legally obtained and unsuccessful attempts by local groups to have those permits rescinded. The third week there was a front page story with two inch heads and pictures of the marchers: KLAN MARCHES IN TIPTON!

For the rest of the spring the story was front page news. The march, the recriminations, the arrests, the fall-out. What struck Jack as he sat in the
Gazette
morgue paging through old issues was not the fact of the Klan march, which they'd heard about although it occurred three years before they arrived at the university. No, what got him where he lived, that is, where his kids lived, as he stared at the front page photos and the ones that ran inside, were block-printed signs several of the hooded marchers carried. Give Us Back Our Schools.

That was the narrative? School board closes country schools. Country kids are bussed into more affluent, more academic Tipton where they feel second-class and second-rate, and something ugly that is always with us, something that breeds hoods and Final Solutions, wakes and shakes its rodent head. There was a march, beatings, two arrests. School performance plummeted. Then time passed, and hatred returned to its cave. The only long-term effect was that in a university town, test scores continued to be abysmal because of a school board decision in 1991.

Jack closed the black leather ledgers in the
Tipton Gazette
morgue. It was going to take more than speeches to students to undo this, even if student votes would help pass the levy. Jack stood, fearful, worried about his kids.

***

That night, after Lizzie and Simon stopped battling the inevitable and switched off their lights at ten-thirty, Genna entered their bedroom and sat beside Jack on the bed. She looked tired or perhaps just worried. When she was either, her cheeks sagged. The wrinkles at the corners of her mouth showed more prominently and her eyes, which were blue-gray and could present anywhere along that gradient, looked dark as storm clouds.

“We've got to talk,” she said.

When a couple's been tiptoeing and feeling as if maybe their hearts could slowly open, it is some scary shit, Jack thought, to hear that particular phrase. Did she want to talk about the affair, to which he'd confessed only in the most general terms? Or was she finally going to confess where she'd been all those nights last winter, a mystery he wasn't sure he wanted solved? “What do we have to talk about?”

“Simon's getting harassed at school. He comes around the corner and kids bang into him. They say, ‘Die, faggot,' or ‘Die, homo,' and keep going.”

“What kids?”

“Apparently, there's quite a few.” Her eyes were the gray of grief. “He doesn't know any of them.”

“But they know him.”

She nodded.

“Maybe,” Jack began, and before he uttered another word he knew he shouldn't. But all last year when they'd been having such trouble and the years before, too, when the troubles were building, baby troubles, then toddlers, then troubles learning to gallop on their own, Genna had urged him to get in touch with what he was feeling. Here it was. “Maybe if he didn't wear fishnet sleeves and backed off on the eyeliner, kids wouldn't be calling him faggot.”

“That's hardly the point.”

He looked at her and she looked at him, and all they hadn't talked about was right there with them.

“For once in his life it wouldn't hurt to fit in.”

“That's Simon.” She laughed. “So adept at fitting in.”

A thousand incidents leapt to mind. At eight and nine, Simon still insisted boys play Barbie. They'd explain over and over he had to choose between getting his own way and making friends. Because he was lonely, he'd always answer, with that cherubic grin, I pick friends, Daddy, but he didn't or couldn't.

Jack asked, “How'd you find out?”

“I came home after driving Lizzie to soccer practice, and he'd made himself this giant pot of spaghetti.”