Virginia Lovers (23 page)

What he felt was this: anxiety and torpor. Anxious to discover something, to happen upon someplace or someone new and mysterious. And at the same time the stifling boredom, or resignation that this orbit would produce no new discoveries, uncover no new provinces, lead him to no one new or interesting. Driving along with his windows open, the brash sounds of Top-40 radio and staticky 8-track guitar rock spilling from the cars of fellow orbiters, Thomas understood why Pete numbed himself nightly with pot and beer and God knows what else. He saw too why Danny would do anything to escape this perpetual circle. At home, studying in the library rehearsing for a play or practicing for a football game, the boy had been sentenced to his own monotonous cycle. Thomas understood now what happened that morning his two sons drove off together in the Galaxy: they’d joined together in an attempt to break this cycle, and their journey had to do with other things besides that Pierce boy’s death or the part they had played in it, at least on the deepest level, the bedrock desire that fuels all journeys, physical and spiritual. Thomas remembered how the boys used to wake on Saturdays when they were in grade school, climb on their bikes, and disappear into the weekend. How easy it had been for them to find something that fascinated them, for even the woods behind the house were limitless and inexhaustible.

What happened to their ability to transform their surroundings into a place of possibility and mystery? Why were they not able to dream their endless journeys through town in images of victory and romance instead of sighing at the cartoonish backdrop of sewing-machine repair shops, used-car lots, feed-and-seed stores?

Poking along in the panel truck, the lone adult in a river of teenagers, Thomas mourned the loss of his own vision. To a newspaperman like himself—not a journalist, not a writer, but a smalltown editor—imagination could be a hindrance. At least he’d let himself believe so. Who what when where how. The facts, the truth. Now these facts, this truth, appeared as mundane and familiar as the route he’d been blindly following for the last forty-five minutes.

Behind him a gargantuan-tired pickup blared its horn as he whipped without a signal into the dusty parking lot of Cantrell’s Lumber, swung the van around, headed against the stream to his office. Already the words were coming, quick and effortless, Pete dictating from the grave.

Adolescence is less a time of unruly hormones than of burgeoning perception.

Safely in his office, seated in front of the typewriter, Thomas considered his audience, as he had been trained to do. To hell with selling papers to damn fools. Yet the most egregious sin in small-town newspapering, aside from spelling someone’s name wrong, was to write preciously, bombastically. Well, it was a sin to him; Thomas wasn’t so sure his editorials were read closely enough for, say, Hoot McCallister and his cronies around the breakfast table down at Dawson’s to criticize the pretentiousness of his prose.

So if you’re not sure anyone’s going to read them, he heard Danny say, why do you care how it’s written? Why not write it however you want? Danny, the constant voice of reason, logic, courage: he stood up for people, the maligned, the disenfranchised, the discriminated against. Thomas remembered a time when Danny had taken Pete’s side after Thomas had warned his youngest son not to hang around Anthony McRae; both boys had accused him of being racist, and it had infuriated him at the time, but now it struck him how quickly Danny rose to the defense of his brother’s friend, even though it was clear that he got along with neither party. And he was nice to that Pierce boy when the rest of the town mocked him with limp wrists and exaggerated falsettos. He was brave when it came to the lives of others, at least.

Write it however you want. Couldn’t he write it to Danny? He certainly could not talk to him these days; couldn’t talk to Caroline, either. He could put it all into his editorial, his recognition of how it was for his boys, the fear and boredom they felt, those things that had overcome him as he’d swept along in the benumbed orbit that was adolescence itself. A metaphor he would certainly use.

Adolescence is too often dismissed by those of us who have managed to survive it as a time of surging hormones and sullen rebellion. We look to our teenagers not for surprises—for burgeoning perceptions, that is—but to confirm the clichés we have consigned them to.

And these clichés abound. We see our sons and daughters in light of their selfishness, their vanity. We complain about phone lines tied up for hours, unavailable bathrooms. We criticize their clothes, their music, the very words they use to express themselves.

From the moment they pass from childhood until they leave home forever, we unthinkingly transform them into figures from some generic cartoon.

Perhaps it is our parental way of coping with what is an inarguably tense time. Raging hormones do make for mercurial emotions, and talking back to one’s parents is as much a part of growing up as is learning to walk.

Yet too often we fail to find other ways to deal with our teenagers besides treating them like characters in a hackneyed cartoon strip.

Recent local events involving young minds and bodies forever destroyed by a night of unsupervised celebration should lead us to reexamine the way we think of adolescence and, more important, the way we treat our teenage children. What happened here was no parent’s fault—if they want to throw a party, kids will find the means and the venue, as a half-dozen bottle-strewn parking lots around town every Sunday morning will attest.

No one in particular is to blame, but perhaps we are all a bit at fault here—those of us who are parents to teenagers, those of us who come into contact with them through our work, or church, or neighborhoods. Maybe the recent tragic events were caused in part by our blinding lack of imagination where our teenagers are concerned. Maybe our unwillingness to be surprised by our adolescent’s ability to act unpredictably (which is boundaryless, if rarely noted), to color outside the lines we have so severely drawn, is as much at fault as the specific circumstances of the tragedy.

One of our own is dead, and another of our own stands trial for this death. Several young lives have been irrevocably altered by this tragedy and yet the truth is not confined to the objective reportage printed in the pages of this newspaper. Those facts need stating, and we are all curious about their unfolding—rightly so, for it is the job of this newspaper to provide the community
with
the simple facts of the case.

Yet a deeper truth—one in which we all might somehow share some responsibility—goes unreported here. The risk for us is that, by letting it go, by treating our adolescents without respect and imagination, in rote and narrow reactions to the very real issues of growing up, we set the stage for similar tragedies to come.

Great editorial, he imagined hearing as he cleaned it up and dropped it in the box to be typeset. He imagined Caroline coming wordlessly, physically back to him, moved by a few column inches. He saw Danny reading it on the couch before supper, saw the ice break in his heart, heard the crack and shatter of that ice as Danny acknowledged with a glance his deep thanks and love.

For the rest of the week, Thomas actually felt hopeful. He recalled the earliest days of reporting, when his whole body had swelled at the sight of his byline. He wasn’t gloating—his son was dead, and that fact never left him. But there was a difference in the weight of his sadness, as if this editorial was ballast, cast off to lift them all above an earth turned intolerable. It was his secret, as yet unrevealed; concealed from everyone, known only to him, it grew more powerful until, ferrying the plates over to Mt. Sinai, Thomas fantasized receiving a Pulitzer.

Rick Hampton was the first to comment.

“Good editorial,” he said. Exactly the words Thomas desired, yet why did they sound so inadequate? He told himself he did not really care what Rick Hampton thought, yet he couldn’t resist a nudge.

“You liked it?”

“Hell, they need somewhere to go, those kids. We got the same problem over here. Hanging out in the parking lots at night, drinking and carrying on.”

Thomas chewed his cigar stub to keep from talking. Still he heard his words: you missed the point, that editorial was about perception, about a compassionate vision.

“And those keg parties …” Hamp was saying, “… half of ’em smoking pot…”

Thomas was off his stool before Hamp could finish his sentence.

“Running late,” he called out as he left the grill, careful not to look back over his shoulder, reveal his reddening face, the anger and disappointment he knew showed in his eyes.

Hell, it’s only Hamp, he told himself on the ride home. What could he expect from someone who padded his paper with wire-service fluff? But
it’s
only Hamp
turned out to be, literally, the truth; only Hamp mentioned the editorial. Nothing at all from Caroline, not a word from Danny. Strickland, well—when he didn’t say anything, Thomas made excuses for him: Strickland was a businessman, he wasn’t saying anything because it was over his head, he didn’t know what to say.

Still, Thomas’s disappointment festered, and by the next day, Thursday, he’d turned sullen. A Thursday was the worst day of the week for a coddled resentment, for it was the one day of the week when he could not legitimately claim work to do. He’d not played golf since well before the funeral, and given the way the boys had always felt about his belonging to the country club, he’d already decided to let his membership lapse, or give it to Strickland.

He lay abed so late in the morning that Caroline came to check on him.

“Are you okay?”

He could not answer this question, so he posed one to her.

“Did you take Danny to school?”

“It’s after nine,” she said. He felt the mattress sink with her weight, and for a second he imagined the sound of snaps, zippers, the rustle of fabric leaving skin. He imagined her body suddenly and warmly next to his own. There seemed to him in that moment no better cure for his hurt.

But there was only the sound of her breathing, and then her words.

“I don’t want to go through this trial,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“I don’t feel ready. It’s two weeks away and I don’t know how I’m supposed to get ready.”

He knew exactly what she meant by “get ready,” and yet he stopped himself from saying the very opposite. He knew what he needed her to say then, and he knew how badly he needed to say it, and yet he said nothing but “Yes,” which wasn’t enough. No, yes—even words these simple and unambiguous took a tremendous effort, and he lay paralyzed, exhausted from speaking and anxious over not being able to give Caroline what she needed.

A few seconds later Caroline rose and stood above him.

“I have some errands to run,” she said. “I should be back by noon. There’s nothing to eat for lunch, but if you can wait—”

“I’ll get something downtown,” he told her.

An hour or two later, still in bed, he realized he had not laid eyes on her at all that morning. He remembered how many times he’d had cross words with one of his sons in the morning—well, with Pete—and it was this thought that finally got him out of bed, dressed, and out the door to his office.

Which was empty, thank God. Of course, it was Thursday afternoon, there was no reason for his staff to be there, no reason for him to be there either; he should be home with his family, doing something with his sons. Son. Children. Wife and child.

He could take them out to eat tonight. He imagined the three of them cramming into a corner banquette out at Dawson’s, tucking into the special, talking about their day. He owed it to Pete not to let things slide back to the way they were. Yet he wondered how he would ever be able to be there—wherever
there
was—with the two who remained, Caroline and Danny. He worried that he’d never be able to engage. How do you learn such a thing so late in life? He feared that he was meant to remain inside his cocoon forever, that the next stage—that place where you lose yourself enough to join together with other people—was not available to him.

It had served him well professionally, this distance, for how else would he have been able to commit himself so vigilantly to the truth? Seated at his desk, his typewriter armed with paper, he studied the awards hanging on the walls of his office, certificates from the Press Association honoring his rigorous reporting. He’d lived for these awards, taken so seriously the scrupulousness they honored. Yet what had he changed with his articles investigating the execrable conditions of migrant work camps? Thomas considered that his son—his only living child—had been having sex with a man while his brother was murdered in an alley. This was the type of detail that would sell papers to damn fools. He would have felt a charge discovering it, an even bigger charge printing it, for it was the kind of truth that people hid, that was his job to expose.

Because things did not seem as if they could get any worse than they were at this moment, Thomas forced himself to think of that slow return to life that people—good-hearted people, people trying to help—prophesied for him:
Everyday you’ll feel a little bit better. Some days you won’t be able to measure it, you maybe won’t even notice it, but it’ll come.

So far it hadn’t come. He knew he was doing something wrong—or, rather, that there was something he was failing to do to make himself feel better—but the idea of doing anything at all was ludicrous to him. What could be done about the way he felt? He knew next to nothing, finally, about how to will himself out of an emotion. Nor could he consider it for very long. The concept was so abstract it made his head ache. His life wasn’t about abstractions, though Pete would have loved this notion, would have embraced it, for he loved abstractions. Maybe it was the pot, or the times—the books he read, Carlos Castenada, Ram Dass, hippie philosophers whom Thomas used to criticize without having read. He nearly smiled recalling their arguments, Pete’s way of making him seem far more severe and authoritative than he wanted to be. Briefly he regretted his severity, until he remembered that he was, after all, the boy’s father, that a certain amount of dogma comes with the territory.