The Love Children (9 page)

“She wants to make him feel safe,” Mom said, “to make him
feel loved.” She said Eve would get swallowed up in taking care of him, but that was her choice because she was self-sacrificing, a saint. The way she said it, I thought Mom wouldn't want to be a saint herself.

She said her friend Alyssa was a saint too; she said lots of women were—too many. These days she hardly ever saw Alyssa, who was too tired from sitting in the hospital all day with her son Tim, who had leukemia. Mom said Tim might
die.
I couldn't picture a kid dying.

In the summer and fall, Mom sometimes went to doctors' offices or labs with Alyssa, to sit with her while Tim had one test or another. And sometimes she picked up groceries or went to the bank for Alyssa, but after Christmas, Tim went to Sloan-Kettering in New York for treatment. Alyssa moved to New York and lived with her sister in her big apartment on Central Park West. After that, Mom and Alyssa only spoke on the phone every couple of weeks.

I wondered whether my mother's friends just had bad luck, or whether she chose people with some kind of fatal flaw. I believed that some people were immune to such sorrowful things, that there were people whose lives went easily, happily, all the time. I was sure there had to be people like that, and I wanted to be one of them. I felt that my friends and I might be. I knew that Dolores wasn't, but I thought Sandy and Bishop were. I made a secret decision to be a lucky person for the rest of my life.

 

Mom specialized in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature; she taught seminars on Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. She was researching a book on Emily Dickinson, but they wouldn't let her give a seminar on Dickinson: she was “not important enough.” Mom was outraged. She considered Dickinson the greatest American poet ever, but there was nothing she could do except keep urging her department to
allow it. It took them until 1980 to change their minds, but she won eventually. In 1975, she got them to let her offer a course on women writers of her period—Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, and others. She had always offered a lecture course on the men of that period—Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, William Dean Howells—and she would sneak some Cather and Glasgow in. I read all the books Mom taught. I liked them all; I even liked Dreiser, whose books, like Thomas Hardy's, I found long and depressing. Both seemed to feel that human beings didn't have a chance, that God, the odds, the environment, sexual desire, or something else had stacked things hopelessly against them. Still, bits of truth glittered in them, and I liked reading about the way things had been in times past. Some of those writers I loved, among them Willa Cather. She was so clean and open, and she loved the land. I felt that she and E. M. Forster were poets of topography; the way he loved the landscape of England, she was thrilled by every clod of earth, every reed and thistle, every stream and hill in the United States. It was exhilarating to read them. But most of all I adored Emily Dickinson. When I read Dickinson, I felt that I was being hit with one truth after another by a soft little voice using shimmering language.

 

One afternoon in October, a Tuesday, my period was really heavy and I was in a lot of pain. Midol wasn't helping that day, and I went home from school to lie down, skipping French. I figured I'd call the restaurant from home, say I was sick.

I was not only sick, I was also upset. I'd seen Steve the afternoon before, in the fifteen minutes between the end of school and the start of my shift at Sonny's. His car was parked behind the restaurant, and we did some heavy petting in the backseat. I hate rushing things like that, but my body—it acted the way it had the day we'd seen the armed police—something was different
inside me. I responded to him in a way that scared me. So I thought superstitiously, in a way typical of a person who was ignorant of sex, that these menstrual pains were punishment for this new fervor. I knew I was edging close to something major. I
wanted
. I felt that my inside was a gaping abyss starving to be filled. The feeling terrified me, and despite my “liberated” upbringing, I felt sinful, bad.

I unlocked my front door with a heavy heart and then was shocked to hear strange sounds in the house. My heart stopped. Mom wasn't supposed to be home yet. Who was there? A burglar? Maybe Daddy had come home. His car would be back in the driveway, by the garage, and I wouldn't see it from the front door. I peered into the living room. There was my mother on the couch with a man I'd never seen before. She was naked, straddling him where he sat on the couch, and he was moaning.

I flew up to my room and curled up in a fetal position on my bed, aching physically and mentally. A while later, Mom knocked on my door and came in, her clothes askew. She put out her hand. “Honey,” she said, “come out.”

I walked out, attached to her hand.

“I'm sorry to shock you, Jess. But come and meet Philo.” The man was sitting on the couch, his clothes in place. His face was flushed.

“Jess, this is Philo Milovič. Philo, this is my daughter, Jess.”

We said hello, both mortified. I examined him furtively. He was pale, with dark hair and the most beautiful face I'd ever seen on a man, better looking than even Ted. And he was very young, in his twenties, much younger than my mother. Closer to my age.

 

That night, Mom asked Philo to stay for dinner. She made crêpes stuffed with chicken and mushrooms, one of my favorites. I felt better after a nap, and I chopped shallots while she made sauce. With it we had rice and a sliced tomato from a local farm, the
only kind Mom would buy. There were still a few late ones left. Philo set the table, then sat in the kitchen with us, sipping a scotch and talking to Mom about Moseley gossip and asking me about Barnes. It felt nice, like a family. Mom had a drink too, and she was sipping it, not gulping it down the way she did around Dad. We talked, laughed. The kitchen television set was on low, broadcasting the evening news. It was like I used to think a family could be, but ours never was.

I wondered how long they'd known each other. I kept remembering my father's suspicions. My imagination leapt back to when Dad was home last year, when Mom didn't get home until after six day after day, and acted so . . . I don't know . . . strange. I couldn't help wondering if she'd known Philo then. But I decided finally that I didn't want to know. She was entitled to some happiness. And in truth, Philo acted as though he didn't know Mom all that well. He was nice; he didn't try to act like my father, but behaved more like a brother. And I'd always wanted a brother.

Philo went home that night, but came back again on Saturday. He had dinner with us; Mom made a blanquette de veau, one of her specialties. Dinner was so nice and the talk so interesting that I was not enthusiastic about going out, but Sandy, Bishop, and I were going to the movies. When I got home at one in the morning, the house was dark. I peered around the corner and saw that Philo's car, a maroon Buick convertible, was still in the driveway. My heart skipped a beat.

The next morning, I awoke before they did. I prepared the ingredients for omelets—boiled ham, leftover boiled potatoes, Swiss cheese, basil, parsley, and chives. They still weren't up, so I made breakfast menus. I used Mom's gray typing paper; I folded it in half and tore it against a ruler so the edges were frayed, then, using my most elegant calligraphic script, I wrote out a menu for each of them, decorating the edges with floral designs. I listed things in an attractive way:

When I got tired of waiting, I made coffee, hoping the aroma would wake them up. Mom came down about ten-thirty, and when she saw what I'd done, I thought she was going to cry. Philo came down laughing about not having a toothbrush and having to use his fingers to brush his teeth, and that was the end of her teariness. You could tell he was young, his spirits were so high. It was nice, having company. They both said they wanted everything in their omelets, and everybody ate every scrap and talked and laughed the whole while.

It was the happiest I'd been for a long time.

Then Mom said we should go to Walden Pond and take a walk. We started out with Mom walking with Philo and me sort of hanging behind them; then Philo dropped back and told me to walk with Mom for a while, so I did. On the way back, Mom called to us to go ahead; she wanted to look at some shrub. Philo and I started off. Philo talked to me like a friend. He asked me what classes I was taking and what I was reading, and I told him about Doris Lessing. He'd never read her, but he seemed interested. He taught seventeenth-century literature—Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Robert Herrick, and Francis Bacon. I had never heard of any of them. I knew John Milton and Andrew Marvell: in English I'd read one of Marvell's poems, “To His Coy Mistress.” I'd loved it so I remembered some of it and quoted it to Philo: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime” and “But at my back I always hear / Time's
winged chariot hurrying near.” Philo was very impressed that I remembered that much.

Philo recited another poem by Marvell he said I might like. It was long, and he didn't recite all of it, but one stanza really struck me:

That really knocked me out. A green thought in a green shade. That was great, just like where we were in the woods, where the very light turned green from the leaves above us. And the sugar maples had turned dark, in a spiral, a corkscrew of gold and red that colored the air copper. I loved Philo for introducing me to that poem.

He talked more about Marvell and Milton and Herrick and other poets, and pretty soon I was feeling stupid. And he stopped talking suddenly, and asked me which authors I liked.

“Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf,” I responded.

“Virginia Woolf!” He was surprised. He said he'd never read her. I was shocked that anyone hadn't read Virginia Woolf; I felt a huge relief. He couldn't think I was stupid if he hadn't read Virginia Woolf! He didn't even seem to know how great she was!

It was a beautiful day. Almost, but not yet “bare ruined choirs.” I remembered Mom quoting from Shakespeare's sonnet years before when Dad and she and I took a walk through Walden, Dad grimacing and making some joke about her showing off. She got
tears in her eyes. I had been angry with Dad for that. I loved it when my mother recited poems. And that sonnet had seemed so right to me. “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” in the almost leafless woods.

 

That night I asked Mom how she'd met Philo. She said he was an adjunct at Boston University, finishing up his doctorate there, writing on Marvell. She had met him at a Harvard party given by a teaching fellow she knew.

“When?” I asked, hating myself.

“Oh . . .” She was vague. “A month or so ago.” I let it go. I didn't want to pin her down and make her lie to me. So what if she hadn't been faithful to my father? Still, I knew I'd never do that. Never.

“How come you paid for dinner tonight?” I asked. “Isn't the man supposed to pay? You never paid when Daddy took us out.”

“Daddy has money now,” she said. “When we first knew each other, he was broke. I paid for things all the time. Before you were born, I supported us. And Philo doesn't earn much.”

“He has a nice car,” I retorted. “Nicer than yours.”

“Yes,” she agreed with some surprise. “I imagine his family bought it for him.” She thought, then said, “What do you mean, nicer than mine? Mine's a Volvo.”

I laughed. “A hundred-year-old Volvo.”

“Oh. I guess it is.” She didn't pay attention to things like that.

The next time Philo came over—he visited most Saturday nights—he brought me a tiny book of Marvell's poems with a beautiful lavender cover, a book you could read holding in one hand. It was a facsimile, with the original spellings. I loved it, although some of the poems were in Latin, which I couldn't read. But I read the whole poem about the green thought in a green shade. I had a little trouble understanding it, but I clung to what
I did understand. And I found another poem I loved, called “The Definition of Love.” It begins:

That poem hit me hard, but I didn't know why. It wasn't as if I was in love with anybody in that way or could even imagine it, yet it felt familiar, something I'd always known. It felt
right
, as though maybe all love was like that. I memorized it and recited it to Mom, who smiled and said she'd always liked that poem too.

Sometimes Philo stayed the whole weekend, but some Sundays he went to his family's home for dinner. He was Croatian; his grandfather had got out of Yugoslavia after World War II. He disappeared into his family quite frequently. But we never met them. Funny.

 

Steve and I pulled back from each other after the day we petted in his car. I never could seek him out: either he waited for me outside Barnes or I didn't see him. I'd never thought about his inaccessibility until he stopped showing up. I suppose I could have looked for him at Cambridge High and Latin, but I had no idea which exit he used or what his schedule was. He'd long ago asked me not to call him at home; his grandmother was old and tired and didn't like answering the phone. And he never called me. Sometimes I thought he was afraid of Mom answering the phone, but I couldn't figure out why. She was always nice to him and always asked him to dinner when she saw him and listened to him when he talked and asked him questions. And Steve liked Mom, I could tell. But he thought she had sent me to Vermont to get me away from him, and no matter how nice she was to him,
he believed that she didn't really want him in my life. I didn't think that was true, but maybe it was. And even if it wasn't, I didn't know how to get him to stop thinking it.