The Love Children (2 page)

Sandy was tall, with light brown eyes, dark blonde hair, and long arms and legs. I have light blonde hair and blue eyes and people always said I was beautiful, but to my sorrow I was and still am short and have a tendency to bustiness that I deplore. I wore oversize T-shirts and sweaters to avoid comments on the street.

Sandy and I were smart enough that we didn't have to spend much time on our homework. So was Bishop, our friend. His father was the police commissioner in Cambridge. He was taller than Sandy and gangly, with eyes as pale as water. His skin was pearly, giving off light. He was a butterfly, flitting from one thing to another. He would stop and sip, leaving behind a tinge of sweetness. Both Sandy and I were in love with him. None of us ever made out with each other, although we thought about it.

Most of my friends and I started out in the Cambridge public schools, but for high school we were sent to Barnes, a private school. Barnes was housed in an ivy-covered stone mansion in the wealthy part of Cambridge north of Brattle Street, within walking distance of Harvard Yard and the Square. With our small classes and smart teachers, we were ahead of the public school kids even though we cut school fairly often, as did the public school kids.

In the fall of 1968, when I started at Barnes, Harvard students took over the Yard. It had been an eventful year, beginning with the Tet Offensive, and followed by a Viet Cong attack on Saigon and Hue. Events on campus were set against life-and-death matters in the larger world, and it was exciting to walk through the Yard, with hordes of students milling around the administration
building, people yelling through loudspeakers, students sitting in, everybody protesting the Vietnam War. The same thing was happening in other schools but I wasn't all that up on the news; most of us weren't, except Bishop, who was kind of crazy on the subject. His jaw would set and his mouth get almost mean when he talked about the war. I admired his seriousness and tried to equal his passion. But I knew I was a “flibbertigibbet,” as my father constantly reminded me.

When, in October 1968, our government began to negotiate with the Vietnamese in Paris, we were all sure that it was student protest—our movement!—that had forced it to act and that the war would be over in a few months. We believed that we, our generation, had provoked this. It was heady, a triumphant affirmation of our power. We would not have believed then that the war would drag on for another seven years. It's hard for people who weren't there to imagine that scene now. None of the many wars since—in Grenada, Panama, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the Gulf, and Iraq—have aroused anything like that degree of sustained protest.

The air in Cambridge in those days was fragrant with the scent of weed as my pals and I happily walked the streets for hours. A bunch of us would gather in my kitchen after our travels, sitting around the table, on the armchairs, and the floor, talking and drinking Coke. My friends always left to go home for dinner about the time my mother came home to start cooking.

Few parents were willing to put up with the whole crowd. We could go to Phoebe Marx's apartment in a fancy building. It was always empty, because both her parents worked, but it was dark because it was on the first floor, and there was never anything to drink except water; her mother was a doctor and refused to buy sweet drinks. We could go to Sandy's, but she lived way out in Belmont—too far to walk. She took a bus to school, or her mother or father drove her. Her house was a wide brick colonial
with big windows. Light streamed into all the rooms, and I loved that. They had wall-to-wall carpeting in every room, not old-fashioned Persian and Indian rugs like ours. But the atmosphere was so refined, so quiet and mannerly and beige, like the furniture, that we didn't really feel comfortable there. We didn't go to Bishop's that often either. His parents had built a rec room in the basement for the kids, and his younger brothers were always around, playing pool or just running and yelling, so boisterous and present that we didn't love being there. I was an only child, my father was rarely in the house, and if my mother was home she was in her study, so my house became our usual destination.

I see now that most of us were well-off, but I didn't realize that at the time. We weren't considered wealthy in our own society, so it escaped us that we were among the privileged of the world. Our parents probably did think about the bills, yet they could afford to hire people to clean their houses and wash and iron their clothes, take care of their lawns and gardens, cater their parties. They bought good clothes—Sandy and I had our worst quarrels with our mothers over clothes. They would buy sweet little dresses for us and beg us to wear them to cousin Lily's wedding or Great-Grandma's funeral, but we stormed out of rooms and slammed doors, loudly lamenting that destiny had provided us with such square parents. We refused on point of death to compromise our principles.

My family lived a few blocks from Harvard Yard. I had no idea that our smallish house, whose lack of modernity embarrassed me, was something other people might envy. Parts had been built in the eighteenth century: there were exposed beams in the ceilings of the living and dining rooms, and the kitchen had open wooden shelves that I hated and my mother loved. The fireplace was old, and the downstairs had wide-board wooden floors. Downstairs were the living room, dining room, and kitchen; an ancestor had tacked a porch on the side and there was a big old
pantry behind the kitchen, part of which my mother had converted into a bathroom. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and my mother's study. Our house wasn't fancy, like the nineteenth-century castle on Garden Street where Bishop lived, with its high ceilings and sculpted moldings and its sliding walnut pocket doors between the downstairs rooms. It had a gallery all around the front and side, nine bedrooms, and two parlors.

What was nice about our house was the backyard, which sprawled into a stand of trees. It had a garage that my father had put a second story on and made into his studio. It had huge windows to the south and east, and a beautiful wooden floor. Back when life was happier around there, he worked in his studio and slept with Mom in the double bed in the big bedroom. I wasn't sure when or why that changed; it happened in whispers behind my back. I was thirteen when Dad announced one night at dinner that he couldn't paint here; Cambridge drove him crazy, Harvard drove him crazy, the Harvard art department drove him crazy, and he was going to move to Vermont, to the cabin up there that we used for summer vacations. It was a shack, really; it didn't have indoor plumbing, and it was isolated out in the woods.

“I just got my PhD, Pat!” My mother cried. “What am I supposed to do with it up there? There's nothing there! I just signed a contract with Harvard!”

“That's nothing!” he countered. “Just tear it up!”

Mom sat back. “I don't want to.”

“We'll rough it,” he urged. “It'll be fun!”

“Fun for who?” my mother challenged.

“Tsk, tsk, your grammar.” Dad laughed. “And you with a PhD!”

She ignored that. “
I'll
be the one roughing it. You'll be in your studio painting, as always. Whereas
I
will have to do the laundry on a washboard, hang the clothes on a line, empty the chamber-pots, wash the dishes by hand, and be a general dogsbody! I won't become a slave!”

“Slave? Slave! It's called being a wife! It's what a wife is supposed to do.”

“According to your family.” Mom's face changed. “Let's not fight in front of Jess,” she said. He shut up then, but both their mouths looked zipped.

After dinner I went to my room to do homework. After I finished, I crept out and sat on the top step, listening. They argued in low, urgent voices. A few days later, as Dad packed his stuff into his car, Mom watched him in silence. When he left, he kissed me good-bye and told me he'd see me pretty soon. It would be months.

I loved my dad and I knew he loved me. Sometimes, when he thought I was being fresh, he'd snarl at me like a dog; but other times he'd chuckle, as if he thought I was cute. Sometimes he looked at me with kind eyes, and he hugged me once in a while. When he was gone the house was quieter. After that, every once in a while he'd descend on us from Vermont. He never called ahead, he just came, annoying Mom. Her reaction bothered me. It was as if he didn't have the right to come to his own house. I loved Mom, but I wished she was nicer to Dad. The main reason she was annoyed was that she hadn't bought enough food for his dinner. But also she knew he was trying to catch her at something.

The Vermont cabin was tiny, with a main room and a narrow bedroom and bath on one side and a loft over them, where I slept. The bathroom had a sink and a wonderful huge old claw-foot tub, but no toilet. Dad absolutely refused to put one in—we had to use the outhouse. The whole place was heated by a wood stove. I loved the cabin; it was beautiful. It was in deep woods, facing a lake, and had no neighbors. There was a canoe Dad's father had built, and a rowboat and a sailboat and an outboard motor. Wood for the stove was stacked in a shed attached to the house, and wildflowers grew all around. I loved to go out at night and lie on the grass, looking at the sky. It was so dark, the stars were like
diamonds, hovering over the lake. For me it had a mysterious resonance with the Little House books I had read, with a dream of an America built by good, hardworking, disciplined people living in a nature that was gorgeous, if harsh.

One day, Dad called from the cabin. I was in my room doing homework when Mom answered the phone, and she called up to say that Dad was on the phone, and if I wanted to talk to him, I should get on the extension. I ran into her bedroom and picked up the phone; I heard him announce to my mother, “I fixed the kitchen for you!”

“For me?” she asked, surprised.

“Yes, of course for you. Who else?”

A little excitement made its way into her voice. “You mean you put in a dishwasher? A washing machine? A dryer?”

“No,” he said angrily. “I put in a gas stove and a new sink. An expensive sink, one of those stainless steel jobbies.” I could picture his set mouth. I could hear the lecture on the environment, on not polluting the lake.

“You didn't take out the wood stove, did you?” I asked.

“No, Jess. It's still there,” he assured me.

“And did you put in a toilet?” Mom asked quickly.

“No, I didn't,” he said. “You know how I feel about that.” He hated toilets on principle.

“And you know how
I
feel about that.”

“Why do you have to be so petty?”

“I don't think it's petty to care about how you spend your life. What you spend your life doing.”

“You know damn well those things harm the environment.”

“I'm not coming to live there, Pat.”

“You are such a bitch!” he shouted. “You bitch, you slut, you whore!” I hung up. Dad rarely called Mom by her name; he usually called her “honey” or “sweetie.” But whenever he was angry, he called her those other names.

We didn't hear from him for another month. The next time he called, I didn't pick up the extension. My mother listened and murmured something that I couldn't hear. When she hung up, she said in an odd tone of voice, “He's finished his studio up there.”

“But he has such a nice one here!” I lamented. I wanted him to come back. I didn't want to live in Vermont any more than Mom did. I loved Barnes, I loved my friends, I loved Cambridge. I didn't want to move. If we lived in Vermont, Mom would have to drive me to and from school every day. I'd never see friends, if I even had any. But if Dad had built a studio there, he was serious.

A few years earlier, he had bought an old barn and had it transported to a meadow near the cabin. Now he'd dug a foundation for it and put in a new floor and electric heat. He'd broken through the walls to insert huge windows, one facing the lake and another facing the meadow. I remembered how dark the cabin was, tucked in the woods, and I pictured light streaming into the barn. In history we were reading a book about ancient Athens that said that the men spent their days in the bright agora, or light, open-sided public buildings, while the women were locked away in the house, running home factories, doing all the work. It gave me some insight into how Mom felt about being in Vermont.

About a month later, Dad came back to Cambridge again. Mom came home from work to find him and me sitting at the kitchen table. Dad had a whiskey and soda; I was drinking a cola. Mom stopped dead in the doorway and said in a flat voice that there were only leftovers for dinner and only enough for two. “What do you want to do for dinner, Pat?”

He looked at her lazily. “I can just have eggs. You know I don't care about food. You got any bacon?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “You can make me a cheese omelet.”

She came in and took off her coat and poured herself a drink. She put the scotch bottle beside the bottle of Canadian Club whiskey on the counter. That was a common sight. “Would it kill you to call and let me know you're coming?”

“What's the matter, you had other plans for tonight?”

Mom rarely went out at night except to political meetings. Dad knew that. She grimaced.

She made him an omelet and gave him the same salad we had, Boston lettuce, asparagus, and white beans. I liked all Mom's dinners, except eggplant parmesan. I hated eggplant in those days, and because of that, Mom hardly ever made it.

It got to be a custom: when he came home, they'd have one serious talk. They'd be in the kitchen. Mom would be cooking and Dad would sit on the kitchen counter over by the washing machine. He would have a drink in his hand, and he would say they had to have a talk. And she would say, “Ummm.” Then Dad would say a wife's first duty was to her husband, in a pronouncement from on high. Mom would exclaim, “Whooa! Listen to the man! The ghost speaks!”