The Love Children (3 page)

She was referring to his ancestor. Dad was related way back to the poet Coventry Patmore, author of
The Angel in the House
, whose thesis was that wives were created to make little heavens on earth for men in the home. I'd never read it and I'm not sure Dad had either. Dad's full name was Patmore Leighton. He used to tell me I had the right to join the Daughters of the American Revolution because his forebears had fought in the Revolution. When he said that, Mom would snarl that the DAR were a bunch of bigots too ignorant to let the great Marian Anderson sing. I didn't know what that fight was about, exactly, but I knew enough never to join the Daughters, whoever they were. Mom came from a Lithuanian family that had settled in Rhode Island; she still had some cousins in Providence. Her name was Andrea Paulauskas Leighton. Whenever Dad started quoting his ancestor,
she would say that a woman's first duty is to herself, that she was a free being, not a possession. I'd disappear then: I couldn't stand those arguments. Dinner would be late that night.

They would have one long talk, and that was it. No matter how long Dad stayed, they'd never talk again and they'd both act mad afterward, walking around barely speaking to each other until he disappeared again. As the years passed, they grew more and more hostile, more fixed in their positions. I couldn't understand why they had stopped loving each other.

My mother was smart and my father was talented. He painted large, energetic squares of color, two or three to a canvas, cerise and gray and yellow, or blue and that same cerise, sometimes with a squiggle or two connecting them. For many years he didn't make any money from his artwork, and we lived on their Harvard salaries. Dad was an adjunct, and Mom just a teaching fellow, and the two combined made hardly any money. At the time I didn't know how hard up we were for money; we had the house Daddy had inherited from his great-uncle, and Mom could turn a cheap cut of meat into a feast.

But when I was eight or nine, Daddy was “discovered.” An important art critic wrote about him, and after that galleries called and then articles and reviews proliferated. Museums and collectors bought his work. I was proud that he was famous.

 

One thing we never talked about, Sandy and me, that was sort of a secret bond between us, was our pride in our parents. It separated us from the others in our gang. Nobody talked about their parents—that would have been tacky. But Sandy often quoted things her father had said and I quoted my mother all the time. Bishop's father was famous too; he was a politico in Cambridge, he was deputy police commissioner or something and he knew the governor and Tip O'Neill. Bishop never quoted him though. Still, we knew he used to adore his father, who was a friendly,
laughing man full of good humor even at home. Only these days, Bishop barely spoke to him because they disagreed about the war. His parents supported it: well, two of his brothers were in the service.

We knew little about the other kids' parents, and most of what we did know was bad. Like we knew that there was something weird about our friend Dolores's father and maybe her mother too. I had also met a guy named Steve Jackson, who went to Cambridge High and Latin. Once we met, Steve and I were together all the time: he would hang around Barnes waiting for me after school, or he'd call and tell me to wait for him after school at Cambridge High. Steve didn't like to talk about the fact that he didn't live with his parents. He only told me after a long time that his mother was dead, and he lived with an old woman he called his grandmother, who wasn't any relation at all. She kept him for money from the welfare people, he told my mother at dinner one night. She had three boys living in her apartment, sleeping in bunk beds in one room. Once a week she cooked a huge pot of spaghetti, leaving it on the stove for them to help themselves, all week long. After hearing that, my mother invited Steve for dinner every time she laid eyes on him.

Actually Steve's father was alive, but living with a new wife and a couple of new kids. When Steve was a freshman in high school, he used to spy on his dad. He'd stand in a doorway across the street from his apartment on Mass Ave and just watch. He loved to see his dad come breezing out, brilliant white shirt tucked into tight black jeans, hair in a huge Afro, jingling change in his pocket. He always headed for the T. Finally, Steve got up the nerve to approach him. He crossed the street, walked right up to the man, and said, “I'm your son, Steven.”

The man stopped, surveyed him with cold eyes. “So what,” he said, and walked on.

Steve was even more terrified of him after that.
Sandy and Bishop were one center of our group. It was a big group, thirty or more kids, and we didn't always all hang out together. It was a huge, shape-changing cell with several nuclei. Sandy and Bishop were one nucleus—the intellectuals I guess. Before I met them, I was best friends with Phoebe.

Phoebe Marx's father, like Sandy's, was a professor at Harvard. My mother was a professor at Harvard too—or so I thought. I suspect that Phoebe knew even then that Mom was merely a lowly teaching fellow—there was always an edge of scorn on her face when I talked about my mother. Her father probably knew my mother's job title and told Phoebe. Throughout my sophomore year, I spent many of my afternoons with Phoebe in Cambridge.

Phoebe liked to shop—whether window-shopping or shoplifting, it was her favorite thing to do. My mother disapproved of magazines like
Vogue
and
Mademoiselle
and wouldn't give me money to buy them. So I stole them. I stole lipsticks and nail polish, although I never wore either, and stockings in their cellophane packages; ditto. We stole cigarettes, which we did use, constantly.

Everybody smoked in those days. My father always had a cigarette dangling from his lips when he painted and when he drank—his two favorite things to do. My mother had a cigarette going when she washed dishes; she smoked even in the bathtub. Phoebe's mother, who was a doctor, smoked constantly. She was Chinese and was pretty, dark-haired, and intense. She was a terrible cook. She said cooking wasn't built into the X chromosome. When she did cook, Phoebe said, she'd make things like lima bean casserole, or a tian, a tasteless pie of rice and eggs and zucchini. Usually they had TV dinners in little tin trays. I loved these—they were a treat for me: my mother wouldn't buy TV dinners; she disapproved of them. So I was thrilled when Phoebe's father asked me to stay for dinner with Phoebe when the Marxes were
going out. Phoebe was adopted, which made her special. She said her parents had told her that most children are just
had
, but she was
chosen
, which meant they really loved her.

Phoebe's father was a doctor too, but not the medical kind. He took us out for dinner sometimes. He loved Chinese food, although he wasn't Chinese. There was a great Chinese restaurant in Cambridge in those days, Joyce Chen; we all loved the
moo shu
pork there, shredded pork and vegetables in a pancake. Mom and I couldn't afford to eat out. I didn't understand that either because people said my father sold his paintings for lots of money.

I didn't care about money in those days. I never wore anything but jeans and stole the few expensive things I wanted. But Phoebe loved money. She never had enough, despite her ten-dollar weekly allowance. Phoebe's and Sandy's fathers loved them, and I always felt a little pull of something I didn't want to feel when I saw the way their dads looked at them. My father was hardly ever around, and when he was, he and my mother squabbled. He was nice to me when he remembered I was there. When he hugged me, though, tears would come to his eyes.

Phoebe never showed interest in the boys in our gang, though she was very interested in sex. A couple of times, we went to the Friday night dances at the YMCA and picked up boys and went outside and made out. We did this a few times and it was fun, but once I stayed out later than usual, and my mother came looking for me in her car and couldn't find me; when I got home at four in the morning, she was wild with rage. When I told her where I'd been and what I was doing, she shrieked. She yelled that it was dangerous, that terrible things could happen to me. After that, I lied about where we were going and made sure to get home by one.

Phoebe was much more sophisticated than I was. I usually followed her lead; we did things I'd never think of and wouldn't have done without her. Phoebe and I were never caught in the act
of shoplifting, but my mother did find out one day. I had just got home and was in my room emptying my big shoulder bag when there was a light knock on the door and it opened. Mom stood there, about to say something, when she faltered, having processed what she was looking at: me emptying my bag of stockings and bras I'd stolen a half hour before. Caught holding the bag, I thought ironically. Mom was speechless for a minute, then she strode over and took the packages I was holding in my hands and studied them: two sets of queen-size nylon stockings and a bra, 36D, all still wrapped in plastic. I wore a size 4 dress and a 32C bra. She surmised the rest.

She sank down on the bed. “Why, Jessamin?”

I stood there. I stared back at her, as hard as I could. I made my expression defiant. I concentrated on the fact that it was all her fault for not giving me more spending money.

“I wanted them!” I said loudly.

“No, you didn't,” she said sadly. “That's the thing. That's really the thing. You're risking—do you know what could happen to you if you got caught? Cops grab you, pull you into the office. You know, cops treat kids like dirt. They might drag you down to the police station. You might even be prosecuted if the owners knew you, had spotted you before. You could be sent away to a juvenile detention center. You would hate the way the cops treated you; you'd hate the way the storekeeper spoke to you. You would really hate detention. You would hate your life. And you would have courted this, asked for it, your own self! For what? Queen-size hose and a huge bra? Things you can't wear, don't need? Why?”

I just stared at her. I tried to keep up the defiant look.

“Think about it,” she urged, then got up and started out of the room. She turned back. “It would be good if you saw less of Phoebe.”

“How did you know it was Phoebe?”

She moved her head, as if indicating something invisible at the windows. “It's obvious,” she said.

I was amazed, but then I'd been amazed at my mother before. Little kids think their mothers have eyes in the back of their head, and I used to think my mother could see me wherever I was. I needed to get away from her.

I sank down on the bed and I thought about what she had said. It did seem stupid. Why was I doing it, anyway?

I think that may have been the moment when I made up my mind about something nameless but important, something I didn't so much think as feel. About how to live my life. I didn't know that at the time. I made up my mind not to steal anymore. Not that I'd ever let my mother know she'd influenced me.

I vowed hotly to see Phoebe all I wanted, but in fact I stopped wanting to see her so much. When she would sidle up to me and ask in that sneaky way of hers if I wanted to hang out, I'd say I couldn't that afternoon. After a few weeks she stopped asking, and by Christmas we barely spoke to each other.

That fall I got an after-school job rehanging clothes in an expensive dress shop on Brattle Street. I made twenty dollars a week, so I could afford to buy my magazines and cigarettes. I never stole again.

Funny how deeply
those high school years are engraved on my memory. College is a flash; I barely remember the name of the first boy I made love with, and my twenties are only a blur. But the three years of senior high sprawl across my brain, taking up nearly all the room there is.

I do remember a time before that. I think it was happy; I remember summer days at the cabin, swimming in the lake, paddling with Daddy in the canoe. Sometimes Mom would invite my best friend of the moment to stay with us for a few weeks. I recall good times in Cambridge too, when there were visitors on a Sunday afternoon. Daddy was always nice when other people were around, and he would cook chicken or hamburgers on the grill, and Mom would make ratatouille or potato salad or macaroni and cheese, serving the food on paper plates on the patio or the porch. If they had company on a Saturday night, Mom would cook for two or three days and serve a fancy meal in the dining room with candles on the table and would let me help her.

They often invited Annette and Ted Fields, who lived in Newton, to visit. The Fields were as good looking as movie stars. Annette was tall, with a beautiful shape and curly golden red hair and creamy skin and big blue eyes; she looked like a dancer. Ted was tall too, with glossy black hair and brilliant blue eyes and
very white skin. They were the most beautiful grown-ups I'd ever seen.

Their children—they had three, Lisa, Derek, and Marguerite—were not like them. Lisa was pale, with crooked teeth and close-set eyes. She was smart and athletic. She was younger than I was, but we played Ping-Pong together in our garage, or croquet, if Dad or Ted would set it up for us on the lawn.

But their next two children suffered from terrible problems. The Fields talked about it to Mom and Dad in low voices, saying they wouldn't dare to have another child. Derek, who was ten, never looked at anybody; he didn't speak and was deaf. He couldn't walk very well. They had a red wagon for him, with a back he could lean against. They would settle the wagon in a corner of a room with a complicated puzzle spread out on a board they had fitted across the wagon, and he would be happily absorbed for hours. He was brilliant; he could do the most impossible puzzles. Marguerite was even worse off. Her eyes did not work together, so she walked unsteadily, taking one direction, then another. She would work her way to where she wanted to go with amazing persistence, knocking things off tables trying to keep herself steady. When the Fields visited, Mom would put all the breakable things on the mantelpiece or in the hutch. At seven years old, Marguerite still had to be diapered and was fed in a high chair. Her speech was a kind of growling. Only Annette understood what these noises meant. When the Fields brought the younger children with them to visit, they tried to keep Marguerite in her high chair, but she would cry to get out. You could understand she was frustrated, and Annette would lift her out and try to keep her on her lap, but she would squirm loose. Annette would hand her to Ted, who would lean forward to take her, with such love that I couldn't get over it. They never seemed annoyed or impatient. Once in a while they hired a woman to watch the two younger
children and came without them, but they had trouble finding anyone willing to stay with them.