The Love Children (28 page)

A terrible thought stopped me.

Could it be that Sandy was jealous of my attraction to him? Maybe she didn't want me to get involved with anyone, since she wasn't. Like both of us were attracted to Bishop, but neither of us had acted on it . . .

I didn't like these thoughts. I hadn't completely got over Sandy's attack on me. I knew she was sorry for it, but that didn't mean she didn't mean it. I couldn't bear to think about what it meant. My friendship with Sandy had been the one perfect thing in my life, the one relationship that had no subversive currents. It had proved to me that a beautiful friendship was possible. I would prefer to think that I was a flirty tease than to think that Sandy harbored animus against me. But whatever had happened to Sarah?

I couldn't think about this.

Anyway, I was happy to get involved with Stepan; he was sexy and warmhearted. His sullenness was that of a child whose parents don't listen to him; it made me feel tender toward him, as I
would toward a small child. And maybe because he'd first heard about me from Bishop, he treated me with respect.

During the past months, without anyone to talk to intimately, without Mom or Steve, or even Sandy or Bishop, really, since the days of our intimacy seemed to be past, I had done some thinking about a number of things. I'd come to the conclusion that Christopher and the other guys I'd been involved with at Andrews didn't treat me with respect. Once they'd slept with me, they treated me in an offhand way. I didn't complain about it but it made me uncomfortable; it felt as if I had sunk in their regard. For example, Christopher's simply refusing to listen to my poetry, which, now that I thought about it, was probably as good as his. Steve had respected me, and Bishop, but I hadn't slept with them. I think I had just assumed that that was how boys treated girls they were sleeping with—that intimacy involved feeling so easy with the girl that a boy could talk to her as though she was his maid.

Another thing I realized was that people who are much younger than you are can be, oh, a little trying sometimes. A kid who worked with me at the supermarket, Tarak, was fifteen and beautiful—dark eyes and hair, pale skin—and had a crush on me. He was at me constantly, and I liked him, he was cute and funny, but he laughed at odd things, giggled, and he didn't understand when the manager, Sheila, felt blue. She'd been jilted by a guy she'd loved. Tarak just thought she was funny. Sometimes he got on my nerves. I'm not saying Philo was anything like him, but it made me think that maybe Mom might have had a reason to leave him. Since I'd been holding that against Mom ever since, in a hard place in my heart, it was a relief to understand that she might not have been acting like a witch.

These realizations made it easier for me to get together with Stepan that night. We pretty much stayed together after that.
Cynthia didn't seem to care at all; Stepan had said she wouldn't. She moved into a spare room, but I kept my room. I went into Stepan's once in a while; once in a while he came into mine. But we stayed separate.

That summer, I found out why Cynthia was the way she was. She and Stepan slept together sometimes, but for both of them, it was for comfort. They had never been in love with each other and had drifted together out of loneliness. Cynthia was actually in love with an unsuitable man she thought was unattainable, the father of one of her students. For months, they'd been eyeing each other. They then must have spoken, because over the summer, the door to the tack room—which had a couch—was sometimes closed and seemed to be locked and Mr. Howard's car would be in the driveway.

Stepan and I got along in a calm, sweet way. Both of us were mainly concerned with the farm, but we had desire for each other. My life settled into steady contented rhythms for the first time. I was almost twenty-one and thought I'd found the secret of a happy life.

Soon after Sandy left
, a new guy arrived, Bert Stern, who had gone to high school with Hal Shaw, a cousin of Brad's from Alturas, in northern California. Raised in a strongly patriotic family, he'd enlisted in the army in 1969 and been sent to Vietnam. Hal wrote Brad that Bert had seen and suffered terrible things. Hal didn't know the details; he only knew that Bert's best friend, who had been in the same squad, had been wounded, treated, sent back to combat, and finally killed, along with everybody else in the squad. Bert never talked about Vietnam. He'd been wounded, how, we didn't know, but badly enough to be discharged. That wound apparently is what saved his life; the others he had fought with died in an action that occurred after he was airlifted to Tokyo. After the war, he couldn't seem to find anything he wanted to do; he just hung around Alturas, rummaging for drugs and lounging at bars and getting into fights. Hal told him about Brad and the commune, and he hitched across the country on the off chance that he'd be able to tolerate living with us.

Bert challenged all my prejudices. The minute I heard his history, I felt a certain contempt creeping up my spine. Then I realized that I was automatically adopting the attitude of my high school crowd, which was unfair and adolescent. I decided to keep
an open mind, and when I studied his face and body, when he sat with us, saying he'd like to join Pax, I felt a wave of pity wash over me. He was three or four years older than I was, but he looked ten years older. And his face—there was something destroyed in it. The eyes, so cold, so carefully inexpressive, and the mouth, hard and set and bitter, but verging on a sob. He'd been in the midst of horror, had seen killing and maybe had killed himself. I found myself regarding him with great respect. He was a person who had suffered and survived; that gave him stature. I would not have admitted it, but he was a hero in my eyes.

He wasn't like anybody else I knew. Just the way he stood, with his stiff posture, and the expression in his eyes, marked him as different. He looked not just wary, but downright suspicious; his demeanor was hostile. I told myself—and I imagine the others did too—that this was a defensive posture that would ease up in time. He spoke between clenched teeth, and in low tones, so we all had to lean forward and try to read his lips to understand him. But he spoke so rarely that it did not become a problem.

Bert told us he was tired and needed to rest. He looked and sounded tired. His eyes were tired. But this didn't matter to the guys: when Brad and Stepan heard that he had experience with plumbing and electricity, they could have hugged him. Thrilled to have him join us, they carefully refrained from mentioning the virulent antiwar stance Pax had maintained for years. And the women, especially Bernice and Lysanne, took one look at him and were ready to open their arms and expose their breasts. He brought out the maternal in them; they too saw the hurt in him. I decided I didn't have any maternal side, because that's not how I felt; I just approached him very delicately, like somebody who could be broken easily.

So there was no argument when we voted on accepting him, although I could see that Bishop and Rebecca were not enthusiastic.
I think that they felt that something was off about Bert, something that would make it hard for him to blend in—and that was our criterion, after all. I felt that too, but I thought that his being an injured man and a victim of war should override our doubts. When Cynthia suggested that accepting him was going back on our position against the war, I argued that, however opposed to war we were, we shouldn't blame the poor guys who'd been forced to fight it. Everybody agreed. In truth, now that the war was over, we rarely talked about it anymore.

Bert was more than tired; he was sick. He smoked cigarettes, as we all did, and pot, as we all did, but it seemed to me that he was constantly high on pot, and horribly edgy on the rare occasions when he wasn't. I didn't know how he could afford so much pot or where he got it. I wasn't sure what happened to your health when you took so much. But when the guys teased him about his sources, he would not be baited, and he had enough money to do as he liked. He bought his way in for three thousand dollars, twenty-two hundred of which Bishop forced Brad to send to Sandy—he felt she'd been taken by us. Bert always had pocket money and didn't need an outside job. I figured he got compensation from the government every month—which was only right, except I never discovered how he had been wounded. And he got his mail at a PO box, so I couldn't spy on him.

Bert should never have joined a commune, but that wasn't evident immediately. His rigidity, his stubbornness, and his need to dominate caused general bad feelings, a new experience at Pax. Before he arrived, people who had personal differences settled things by compromise; they made up because they
wanted
to get along, so the general tone was always harmonious. Why else join a commune? When someone got on my nerves, I reminded myself of what Mom would say about her friends' quirks: try to imagine what their days are like. If you imagine being another person,
you quickly understand why they do most things they do. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't imagine being Bert; I couldn't fathom what could be going on in his mind. His expression scared me a little, when a cold hardness settled on his unshaven face, especially if it seemed directed at me. He almost never smiled and I never heard him laugh. He did more than his share of work, however, and with dogged thoroughness. And he impressed the guys, especially Brad, by being utterly self-contained. He rarely spoke to any of the women and rarely looked directly at anyone.

Brad, who was usually pretty cool except to Bishop, accepted Bert instantly. He didn't make overtures toward him, but offered silent, nodding agreement to anything Bert said. When Bert was engaged in a project, Brad always silently appeared to help, and when he needed help himself, he would glance over at Bert. If Bert nodded, so did Brad. They had a tacit concord. The rest of us, sensing this, warmed toward Bert. But he did not return our warmth.

Bishop had loved Brad from the first time he had met him in Nevada, and he still admired him.
L'affaire Sandy
had dented his regard for Brad a bit, but Bishop and Brad still worked together, and their friendship was continually reaffirmed. Bishop was impressed by Brad's knowledge of horses and tools, his expertise in what Bishop thought of as manly arts, and Brad's knowing big-brotherliness toward Bishop. But Brad treated the women at Pax—even Bernice, his lover—with some disdain. I sensed that Bishop was aware of this and didn't like it; he adored Rebecca and Sandy and me; he admired us, thought we were smart and deserving of respect. Maybe Rebecca had been offended by Brad's attitude and had said something and, in any case, I assumed that on their drive to Pittsfield Sandy had told Bishop how Brad had harassed her. And Bishop had to be upset that Brad had essentially driven one of his best friends out of Pax. But he showed
nothing. This made me wonder: was Bishop a wimp? Or was he pulling away from Brad in small ways I could not see but that Brad felt? I think that was the case and that it made Brad even more open to Bert when he arrived—he needed a new ally. It was hard to know, because one thing happened on the heels of another. Sandy left in early May and Bert arrived in June, by which time Bishop was deeply involved in plans that affected all of us at Pax.

Not until supper one night in July 1973 did Bishop tell us his plans. He said, in his unpretentious way, that he had something to tell us. He had waited, he said, until the seeds were in—the biggest chore; the herb garden and vegetables were planted, and we were all relaxed. I was easy, happy. I'd got some free milk from the market (Sheila gave it to me because it was about to pass its sell-by date—she knew how hard things were for us and often did that), so I'd been able to make tapioca pudding for dessert. We ate it with the intense concentration we gave delicious food—always a treat for us—and we were sitting smoking afterward in the quiet that attends deep satisfaction.

Bishop glanced at Rebecca, who smiled encouragingly at him, and dread rose in my heart. They were leaving. I knew it.

Bishop began tentatively. “Uh, well, Bec and I, well, you all know how much we love you, and we love Pax, and the farm and the horses . . . But . . . maybe you feel the same way, there's this little nagging thing, this part of us that hurts and we've been discussing it for a while now . . .”

How long?

“And we started to think it might represent a part of us that isn't getting used. Like maybe our brains.”

At this, everyone howled with laughter. We knew we all tended to veg out. People commented to each other, made jokes.

“Anyway, what we've decided is we need to go back to school.”

Everybody else took this with calm understanding, but I knew the problem wasn't a simple matter of brain rot that could be solved by some Band-Aid solution. I sat, fists tight in my lap, lips pursed, pretending to smile.

They had both applied to UMass in Amherst and been accepted as part-time students.

“Hey!” people cried. “Congratulations!”

Fat chance, I thought. UMass is not a part-time place. It's too far away.

Bishop darted a look at Rebecca, who picked up the narrative. “We plan to commute. We'll leave every Monday after chores, around three or four, and spend Tuesday through Thursday there.

“And the greatest luck!” she interrupted herself enthusiastically. “We found a commune down there that is willing to have us just a couple of nights a week! We'll stay there Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, go to class Thursday, and then immediately drive back here. So we'll be here Thursday night, and the whole weekend.

“The commune down there will rent us a room for ten dollars a week, and we already have enough money saved up to pay for the year, plus expenses like books and stuff.”

This was a stone dropped into my heart and, I think, all the hearts at the table. At that moment everyone saw how things would go. Everyone loved Bishop and Rebecca, who in some way were the core of Pax. We all knew how long the drive to Amherst was, how tiresome. I wasn't the only one who suspected that this was the beginning of the end of Bish and Bec at the commune. We put the best face on it, acted cheerful that they were getting their lives in order. But, I suspect, many at the table were broken-hearted.