Songs without Words (8 page)

“Sometimes I think she wishes she had a gay child,” Harper remarked to her brother.

He shrugged, saying, “Our parents are refreshingly liberal.”

She reached across the table with a napkin and wiped the egg yolk out of his beard. “As are their children. Eliot and I just took part in our third peace rally since the war started.”

“On your home turf?”

“San Francisco. It was fun and a little different because this time there were so many gay men there. There were as many rainbow flags being waved as there were ‘End the War Now’ signs.”

“Are you sure you didn’t get swept up in the pride parade?” Danny grinned, widening his already wide, thin mouth.

“Yes, I’m sure. Because I went to that
last
month.”

“Did Eliot go with you to that too?”

“No. I went with my friend Roxie. She left the kids home with her husband, and we had a great day in the City. The pride parade in San Francisco is a pretty good party, as you might imagine.”

Danny nodded. “Maybe you can take Mom next year. She can march with the PFLAG contingent with a sign that says ‘I wish I had a gay son or lesbian daughter.”’

Harper laughed as Danny returned to his newspaper. Carefully lifting her egg yolk to place it unbroken on top of her toast, she recalled the pride parade and how Roxie had practically begged her to go because she didn’t want to go alone.

“It’ll be a blast,” she insisted.

Harper had never been to the parade and decided it might be interesting, so she skipped her
t’ai chi
class and went into the City instead.

Roxie, who was never a wallflower, was more than usually cranked up that day. She was jumping up and down, hollering, whistling her impressive two-fingered whistle and waving madly, her necklaces of colored beads in constant motion. This was especially true when the peace officers came by. She did everything she could to get their attention, succeeding, finally, when one of the women in uniform waved to her and doffed her hat. Roxie had turned to look at Harper, beaming like a lighthouse beacon, and then turned her attention back to the cop and blew her a kiss. Harper didn’t quite know what to make of it all.

“Do you know her?” Harper asked.

“She’s one of ours. I mean, she’s on our local force. I met her a few months ago. She gave me a ticket for running a stop sign.” Roxie laughed ironically, as though this was much funnier than it seemed.

“So now you’re flirting with her?”

Roxie turned to face Harper more calmly. “Oh,” she said breathlessly, “I’m just getting caught up in the atmosphere, you know? Like that sign we saw, ‘Everybody’s gay for the day!’”

Harper could definitely understand that. She herself had made note of a particular leggy brunette riding a horse, wearing a black leather vest and black chaps, a black cowboy hat tilted up high on her forehead. The vest was open about three inches, revealing that she had nothing on underneath. The cowgirl had ridden fairly close to the crowd, close enough that Harper could feel the hot breath of her horse as they passed by. The woman in the saddle had glanced directly at her and winked, her mouth curled into a seductive smile. She had felt her knees go a little weak at that.

Alice reappeared in the doorway as Harper stabbed the yolk of her egg with her fork and smeared it evenly over her toast. “What are your plans for today?” she asked.

“We’re going out with Dad,” Danny said. “He’s putting the gear in the boat right now. Wanna come?”

“No, thanks. I have to get ready for Neil and Kathy. Besides, I’ll appreciate the peace and quiet. When Neil arrives with that little baby of his, all hell’s gonna break loose. That child never stops crying. And I might even be able to fit in an hour or so on the thimbles while you’re gone. I’ll pack you a lunch, then. Be home by five. Tell your father. I want you here for a nice family dinner.”

Alice scooped up Danny’s dishes and headed back to the kitchen.

“Don’t forget the wine for our lunch,” Harper called after her.

“No alcohol on the boat. You can have Kool-Aid.”

Alice left the dining room again. Harper and Danny looked at each other, wrinkling their noses at the notion of Kool-Aid, then burst out laughing.

“What does she mean by thimbles?” Harper asked.

“She paints them. Paints scenes and pictures on them. It absorbs a lot of her time. There’s one right here.” He retrieved a thimble from a curio shelf, handing it to Harper.

She examined it, seeing a miniature scene with a girl, a dog, sun shining, a couple of trees and a kite. “Cute,” she said, handing it back to Danny.

“At least it’s a better hobby than those paint-by-numbers she used to do, years ago. Remember those?”

“Oh, God! I’d forgotten. Thankfully.”

Danny stuck a finger in his mouth and gagged.

After clearing the breakfast table, Harper waited for everyone to be ready to launch, vaguely looking at familiar family photographs in the hallway. There were pictures of all of them— baby pictures, school pictures, family group pictures and photos of ancient relatives she had never known. Her mother’s cardboard-and-felt family tree also hung here, peppered all over with tiny photographs of people’s faces with names pasted under them. Heading it up was a dour-looking couple—shadowy Irish ancestors. Then the branches spread, a widening pattern of names, a tangle of relationships, leading sometimes nowhere, but eventually to her own grandparents, parents and siblings, people connected to her with red yarn. Her great-grandparents, the Harpers of Connecticut, had immigrated as adults, but her grandparents were American-born. The Harpers were destitute farmers in Ireland, but prosperous farmers in New England. Their life had not been too difficult, not unreasonably so, and their children were well-off and had moved away from toiling in the dirt. Strife had not appreciably touched the family since they had arrived in the New World.

Positioned under these Connecticut Harpers were Alice Caitlin Harper and her Boston-born husband, John William Sheridan. Their three offspring were lined up on a lower tier. Beside Neil, his wife Kathy. Under them, three children. Under Harper, dead space.
There is something wrong with a perspective that implies that your only contribution can be children
, thought Harper. The space under her name suggested more than death of a lineage. It suggested failure, incompetence and disappointment. She had never liked this cardboard monstrosity, and today she liked it even less.

It might be a tremendous disappointment to her mother, she realized, that she didn’t have children. She didn’t see herself as the maternal type. It wasn’t really a choice she had made, not consciously. But then, she didn’t think that Alice Caitlin Harper had chosen her spot in this scheme either. Like so many women of her generation, Alice had had her role thrust upon her by circumstances. She had passively accepted what she stumbled into. Alice was a doggedly sensible woman with native intelligence, unhoned and unembellished. If she had made a plan for her life, Harper didn’t know about it, and it had obviously been set aside at age eighteen when she married John Sheridan.

This chart, then, which looked like there was a consciousness behind it because of all of the orderly connections, was ultimately designed by chance, she decided, like the lives of all of its individual members. There was only an illusion of control—strings of red yarn.

People talk about making plans, Harper thought, but, in the end, most of the decisions they make are made within the context of countless arbitrary movements of particles through space.

Her mother wouldn’t subscribe to this point of view, she knew. She believed that there was a master plan, God’s master plan, regardless of how convoluted and directionless it appeared. Harper had believed in the master plan long ago, but, because of her father, had modified it to fall in line with the laws of physics, as if God and physics were one and the same thing. To her father, they were, of course. All of the mysteries, all of the unknowns were just experiments waiting to be conducted by scientists. Harper embraced the mysteries too. She just had no inclination to solve them. She was open to the answers, and she was willing to accept explanations other than physics and other than God, even though she couldn’t guess what else might offer up such explanations.

At last the men were ready. The three of them loaded into the boat and pushed off onto the lake. Harper sat astern, wearing dark glasses and a wide sun hat. Under a loose beach coat, she wore a one-piece bathing suit. Her father took the steering wheel. Danny started the motor. Soon they were gliding across the water, just as they had done twenty years before as children. The back of her father’s head had changed, though. Wisps of gray hair now blew in the wind while the sunlight glistened on his shiny bald head. But everything else was the same. The shoreline of the lake was familiar, and its couple of small islands reminded Harper of many happy days of youthful play.

Speeding across the lake with her father at the helm and her brother sitting opposite, it took no great leap of imagination for Harper to think of herself as eleven years old again. It was all here, complete and comfortable. Mom was home fussing in the kitchen. When they returned, she would greet them with food.

“How’s this?” her father asked, cutting the engine.

The boat drifted offshore from a grass-covered island. “Great,” Danny said, leaning over to get his fishing pole. “I remember once catching a black bass right here that was almost as tall as me.”

“You were a mighty short kid, it’s true,” their father said, smiling affectionately.

For the next couple of hours, they cast out in three different directions and tended their silent poles. While waiting for a strike, Harper read
Sor Juana
by Octavio Paz, a book she’d gotten from the local library the day after her arrival. She had wanted to read it for a long time and was thoroughly engrossed in the story.

She always had a book going, sometimes more than one, frequently biographies or some nonfiction tale about someone like this, an artist, a revolutionary of some kind, a hero who would appeal to a modern woman. She did not read fiction, except on occasion when a novel was recommended by someone she admired.

“What’s the book about?” Danny asked.

“Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century Mexican nun who became a self-taught scholar and important feminist writer. She was bold and astonishing, especially for the time.”

“Really?” he replied. “You’re reading a book about a nun?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard about her. What did you study at that seminary anyway?”

“Christian theology,” announced Danny, sticking his nose in the air. “That is the study of hypocrisy, misogyny and jingoism at work throughout the
Anno Domini
part of the history of mankind, and I emphasize
man
-kind.”

“That place really turned you against the Church, didn’t it?”

He nodded. “The whole system is just so archaic. The Church is its own worst enemy. Your nun there was probably held back from serving the church in her full capacity in the same way women are today. Or gay men. Or men who want to have sex, for Christ’s sake!”

“Stop right there,” their father said firmly. “I will not have you debating the ordination of women and gay men in my boat. This boat is not a forum for religious discussion. This boat is a safe zone.”

Harper and Danny both stared at their father.

“No religion, no politics,” he continued. “Talk about the weather.”

“Weather, huh?” Danny said, looking mischievous. “Well, the climate at the Vatican—”

The look of warning he got from his father made him stop short and keep his thought to himself.

“Geez,” Harper whispered to Danny, “he really takes retirement seriously.”

She returned to her book and read silently until lunch. Afterward, she drowsed, her hat over her face and beach coat discarded, reclining against a foam cushion. The voices of her father and brother came in snatches—talk of fishing strategies, Danny’s half-hearted job hunting, local characters that Harper didn’t know. Her father’s Boston accent was a soothing lullaby, mingling with the soft patter of water lapping against the sides of the boat.