Because even back then, in 1993, Ethan was already beginning to shut the door, and I felt so lonely on the other side. Oh, he could be effusive, and if it hadn’t been for those times, that part of him, I would’ve left him long ago, as I am thinking of doing now.
Yes, yes, Truman, my little boy, was going to be like me. He was going to bring us so much joy that Ethan would once again be the Ethan I fell in love with when I first met him in front of Dodge Hall at Columbia. He was wearing that tweed jacket (which I never allowed him to toss) with jeans and a white button-down shirt and Doc Martens and his clumsy, absolutely adorable feet, reading on that bench, and he looked up at me with those green eyes as if he’d been waiting for me. Verbose, I first thought, but in a way that mixed his wonderful, self-effacing sense of humor with a gift for understanding the most complex ideas. I was an English major and he was in law school.
We began dating right away, which with Ethan meant going for coffee and talking for hours about our pasts. He talked a lot about his maternal grandfather. Truman Canton, a one-star general who’d had a huge effect on him. Eventually we started going to his dorm room to make love. I started calling him Ethe.
He told me that his parents were both intellects and distant from him, as if they had a secret alliance that excluded him, and his brother and sister, too. But their expectations for their children were high and they could afford to have high expectations, because the Engroffs had plenty of money. They’d owned textile mills in northern Massachusetts and their investments had been wise. When I decided to marry Ethan Engroff, I didn’t know how much money he would inherit. I knew he’d be a good lawyer. I knew that because, when he was verbose, he was eloquent.
But then a bottle of Dolce & Gabbana perfume changed the course of our future life. No more legalese for my Ethan. He’d bought the perfume for me on our very first Christmas together. The idea probably occurred to him when he was holding the elegant box. For certain it struck him by the time he had gift-wrapped the box himself.
To his mind no self-respecting lover would give a gift wrapped by a stranger—too impersonal. I know he thought to himself (as he still does with regularity),
Who boxed this perfume? Certainly not the perfume manufacturer. Who boxes all the things we buy: jewelry, toys, shoes, tea, cards, cereal…etc., etc.
He did rigorous research, hours and hours and hours of research at Butler Library when he should’ve been studying for school. Because Ethan Engroff had already decided he would no longer invest his time in the study of law at Columbia University, but would manufacture high-quality specialty boxes for all the businesses that needed boxes.
“I’ve done the research, Amy, and I cannot fail with this. Plus, if I do,” he said confidently, “I can always come back and take up where I left off”—and he put his finger up in the air to halt any protest I might have had, not that I did—“and even if we are married and Truman is already in the oven—” (Ethe had already decided our child would be a boy, and we would name him after the old one-star general himself, all of which was fine with me and really my idea)—“I still have a trust fund coming from the Engroff side that makes the Canton amount pale in comparison.”
We were married that spring after our first Christmas together, after I graduated, and then we went to the Cape Cod house for two months. We could’ve gone anywhere, gone to Europe or Asia or the islands, but both of us wanted to go to the cape, and so for those two months the house was off limits for any of the Engroff family, including the one-star general. Six bedrooms, each one like a suite, and we made love in each of them. I had never been happier in all of my twenty-two years. It was total bliss, then. Ethe was enthused about his kernel of an idea, as he liked to call it, and we looked at maps of New Jersey attempting to locate the ideal town where we would live, and the location—not too close to where we would eventually settle—where he would start the business. Ethe was so certain the business would be a success. It didn’t hurt that, even though the textile industry had dried up, the Engroffs had incredible connections throughout the world of finance, along with—
I’m afraid this is the way the world works, Baby Amy—
political connections.
Two blissful months of touring the cape and Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. I thought, then, that we could’ve lived there for the rest of our lives. Not long into the second month, I was sure I was pregnant. Ethe was ecstatic. It proved to be a false alarm, but it didn’t matter. We seemed to be utterly perfect for each other, and there was not a single minute, not a single, lovely, blissful minute, we weren’t happy. No spats, no sudden emotional upheavals, no cross moments. Ethe whispered to me one night in one of the six rooms, “We are soul mates, Baby Amy. I know it now and you do, too.”
Oh, and I did. Yes, I did.
We rented a house in Long Valley, New Jersey, of all places, the home of Welsh Farms dairy products, when we returned from the cape, or when we returned from “the Engroff Estate,” as I began to call it, loving how it embarrassed Ethe. He began to look for a location for his business, which he’d call TRUAM Quality Packaging. He finally found an out-of-business warehouse that had once been a thriving Farmall Tractor business. A place where tractors, combines, corn pickers, hay balers and hay mowers had been sold and repaired. But farming was all but gone in central New Jersey, and Ethan bought the warehouse and the hundred acres surrounding it for a song. We began to search for a house, our search radiating out from the factory. Finally we found Persia. It was thirty minutes from NYC on the train, thirty minutes to TRUAM Quality Packaging and four and a half hours, on an early Saturday morning, from Sandwich on Cape Cod.
And only God is cruel enough to take pleasure in the irony that the park in the center of Persia became the deciding factor for us. By all standards it was a beautiful, well-functioning town, with church steeples and a grocery store, a lumber company, a small department store, a liquor store, even a shoe store. We bought in the early 1990s and we were only four miles away from a supermarket. In the late 1800s, Persia was one of the wealthier towns in the region, catering to rich New Yorkers who built large weekend homes there. Ethe and I fell in love with one of the first houses we looked at, and we bought it. It was on a two-acre estate and had once been owned by a distant scion of the Vanderbilt family.
“If it’s good enough for the Vanderbilts,” Ethan said one night over a glass of wine at Vito’s, a restaurant on the Persia square, “it’s good enough for us.”
We clinked glasses, but I knew he didn’t care that a Vanderbilt had owned it. His own privileged upbringing left him unimpressed with the upper classes. Now this house, these lawns and patios, this swimming pool and guesthouse, were Engroff property, and that was all that mattered for the both of us.
Just as Ethe predicted, the business prospered. He began manufacturing boxes for some of the most famous companies and brands in the world: Brooks Brothers, Wempe Jewelers. I went back for my masters in English Lit. at Rutgers, considered extending the program to pursue a PhD. The dean of the department was a lovely, intelligent man whom I adored. He encouraged me to continue and I had every intention of doing so. Then, in 1992, I became pregnant with Truman. I finished my master’s carrying my heavy boy, waddling around the Rutgers campus with a book bag strapped to my back and Truman in the front, and I had never been happier in my life.
Truman was born on September 6, 1993. Truman Abcott Engroff. I had settled upon Truman years before, in the Berkshire Mountains. Abcott was my last name, and Ethan insisted.
“Your family is part of this, Baby Amy. Our family has already hogged enough of the fanfare:
Truman
and
Engroff.
”
I was pleased and touched. I was in love with my husband and my beautiful baby boy. Bliss!
Ethan wept the first time he picked Truman up, then we opened a bottle of champagne and toasted to our wonderful, quiet boy.
It was true Truman seemed more like me. It wasn’t that Ethe always had that edge to him, but I didn’t know when he would retreat and ignore me, and even Truman. As the years passed by and Ethan’s dark periods increased in frequency and duration, it was then that Truman began to kiss me on top of the head.
I knew how much Ethan loved me and Truman. There was no doubt in my mind concerning that, but after a while I got tired of asking him what was wrong and, increasingly, uncomfortable that Truman was watching all of it play out. Then, when he turned thirteen, he, too, began to withdraw. It was a slow process, but I felt it happening from the beginning and as time went on his moods often became as mercurial as were Ethan’s.
I don’t think it was his homosexuality that caused Truman to escape into privacy, even though it coincided with his coming-out to Ethan and then, months afterward, to me. It was Truman, after all, and he was not embarrassed about the truth of who he was. No, I don’t think so. It was more the years of Ethan turning his back on us—at times, that is; Ethe was not a demon, but observing that experience taught Truman to distance himself from other people. I think that as a teenager Truman saw advantages in obfuscating some of his world from me just as his father had for all those years.
I gradually felt the alliance I’d relied upon for so long evaporating like a perfume scent. The very fact that he had confided in Ethan before me on the issue of his being gay alarmed me. He began to see me, often, as a nuisance in his life—too prying, too concerned, too
there.
I loved them both, though. They were my life, Truman and Ethan, with their lovely, enigmatic minds.
In the end it was Ethan who decided we would not have a private burial. It was Ethan who allowed that detective to interfere in my grief over my son, my Truman. It was Ethan who stood at the bedroom window looking out at our lawns with his back to me, his strong and steady and reasonable back, without the slightest sense that at any moment I could be carried away, never to return to this house and to the possibility that soon Truman would be here.
Goddamn you, Ethan,
I thought as I stood there looking at his back that had turned away from me so many times before.
Goddamn you! Goddamn that it wasn’t you instead of my lovely Truman.
Carly
Seven days after Truman’s death
Never! Never again! Not ever fucking again! That’s what I said to myself over and over. Tommy Beck is dead to me. What he did to Steve Brown—broke his nose so badly he required plastic surgery, a broken cheekbone, two broken ribs—I would never be with Tommy Beck again. There were no charges pressed, because we’d all been drinking, most of us smoking weed. When the cops came, we had to stash everything. Most people split, including Tommy, but I stayed with Steve. I was not about to leave him in the condition he was in.
“You have to go, Carly,” Tommy shouted in my ear, alcohol still pungent on his breath. “Carly, Jesus Christ!”
“Fuck you!” I said. “Go! Fucking go!”
He did, of course. He had too much to lose. A full ride to the University of Virginia on a baseball scholarship. He had to go and I was glad to see him gone. Steve sat at a patio chair, the towel he was holding soaked with his blood. We had to call an ambulance, because we didn’t know what kind of damage Tommy had done to him. The kid who’d thrown the party didn’t want us to call, but we did. The cops came, finally, but none of us who’d stayed had been drinking, only smoking. They called our parents and we went home. It was the Persia cops and we all came from families who had connections; the cops were being careful about how they treated us. No one gave Tommy’s name. Steve didn’t press charges. He wouldn’t even tell the cops or his parents who’d done it to him. He said he didn’t know, happened too fast. I think he was afraid to say it was Tommy, because he thought Tommy would go after him again.
After that night, I decided that was it, though. I didn’t want to deal with him. At school he would come up to me in the hallway and try and talk to me, and I’d just keep walking, my eyes straight ahead.
“I’m not like that, Carly. I’m not. It’s just that I know he was after you. Please, Carly.”
At night he would Facebook me, or text me, or call me on my cell. I didn’t want anything to do with him. Nothing!
“I’d apologize to him, Carly. I’d do anything to show him how sorry I am. I know he won’t talk to me. I know he won’t. I can’t blame him. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That wasn’t me that night. My God, Carly, I miss you so much. Please.”
He said this in the parking lot at school one day. I was going home with Jenny Witherspoon—even though before I’d always gone home with Tommy—and he took me by the arm and walked me away from Jenny’s car.
“I don’t even know who you are, Tommy.”
I started to cry.
“Please, Carly. That wasn’t me. I just couldn’t bear to see you always hanging with him. I don’t know what got into me. I mean, except for the beer, which I definitely should not have been drinking. That was not me. I just saw him with you, the two of you smoking, and I…I just lost it. But that was definitely not me.”
I tried to look away from him, but he kept coming around so I had to see his face, had to see his eyes. God, his eyes.
“I miss you so much.”
“I don’t know, Tommy. I don’t know.”
But he saw a sliver of possibility. He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, and then all of the days we’d spent together crept in like morning creeps in and takes over night. He put his arms around me, and I felt his tightness, his hard body.