Consenting Adult (18 page)

“Jeff, dear,” Tessa said. He ignored her and so did his father.

“Very well,” Ken said. “The patient is all there is and to hell with his parents, to hell with the worry they live with, to hell with what they feel—”

“Ken, please,” Tessa said. “Please, both of you, drop this for now. There’s just no point—”

“I can tell you one thing though,” Ken said to Jeff, waving off Tessa without looking at her. “I give you exactly one more year to straighten yourself out through this analysis your mother is paying for, just one more year, and that’s it. The end. Finis. She’s not to go on indefinitely forking up—”

“And if I don’t ‘straighten out’?” Almost, Jeff laughed. “Boy, what a phrase.”

“And if you don’t, if you then want still one more year beyond that, and then maybe one more year after that—”

“Then what?” Jeff asked belligerently. “What are you getting at?”

“Don’t lay down any ultimatums, Ken,” Tessa said, her own temper rising. “If you have to remain apart and silent, I suppose you have to, but don’t start laying down the law about what I’m going to do or how long I’m going to keep on doing it.”

“And if I don’t ‘straighten out,’” Jeff insisted, half rising from his chair and leaning toward his father. “Then what?”

“If you keep on feeling the hell with parents, the hell with their right to know how things are going—”

“Stop that, Ken. Stop it. Stop it.”

“I will not stop it If he wants to cut all communication with his father and his mother, why then perhaps a year from now he’ll also want to cut loose entirely, in a place of his own somewhere where neither you nor I will dare ask him how things are going.”

“I won’t wait till a year from now. I’ll cut loose right now.” Jeff slammed back from the table and slammed out of the house.

It was more than an hour later when he rang the bell at Nate and Margie’s. Saturday was one of Nate’s days off, and they were both there. As Margie opened the door, she cried out, “Jeffie, what’s happened to you?”

She had not used his little-boy name for years, but his face was so distorted, his eyes so wild, her first thought was that he had been in a fight, an accident, had been mugged in the street. His shirt gaped open over his chest, his face was smudged, perhaps even swollen, his “Can I come in?” was hoarse.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

She stood aside and he came into the small front hall. He stood there just inside the door, shaking his head, his eyes closed, his left hand covering his mouth, the long fingers splayed out over his jaw. Nate was there now, as shocked as Margie, and after a moment he took Jeff by the arm, leading him as if he were blinded, through the hall, up the flight of stairs to the living room.

“You need a drink,” he said. “What’ll it be?”

Jeff shook his head for no and sank into an armchair. It was good to sit down; he had been charging around the streets like a madman, and the heat and the sweat and the fury all mangled him.

“What, Jeff?” Margie said.

“You know about my letter to Mama last fall.” It was a statement, made equally to both of them, a preamble to what was to come, and he drew back as they both said, “What letter?”

“My letter. Where I told her.”

“Told her what? She never said anything about a letter. Just that you were going into analysis, is that what you mean?”

“But nothing about the letter I wrote her?”

“Nothing about any letter, no.”

He looked from one to the other, disbelieving. “Well, Don? Did Don say anything about the letter?”

“Don never said a word about any letter.”

“Oh, my God. I thought she’d spill her guts over it, she always spills everything about any of us.”

“Your letter about what, Jeff?” This was Nate, and he put his hand on Jeff’s shoulder, pushing him backward against the frame of the chair so that his face tilted upward and his gaze rose to meet his own. “Better let us have it, kid. Whatever.”

“It was when I wrote about getting to a real psychiatrist, not just Mrs. Culkin, and I said I thought I had to because I was—”

“Because you,” Nate prompted.

“Because I felt surer and surer that I—” He broke off. His fingers interlaced and twisted at each other, knuckle by knuckle.

“That you what, Jeff?” Margie asked. “No matter what, it’ll be better to say.”

“Felt surer and surer I was queer.”

“Queer.”

“A fag, a fairy, a homo. That was last October. But now tonight, Dad just said, he warned me I could have one more year of analysis to straighten out, or—” He lowered his head and raised his big shoulders; they could see only part of his face, see the strained torso.

“Or what, Jeff?” Margie asked.

“When I wrote the letter, I said I wasn’t sure. But since then a couple of things have happened that—”

“Don’t be so wild, man,” Nate said. “I’ll get you a drink.”

“No, I can’t, honestly. Anyway, now Dad said if this second year didn’t help—he said unless I did get straight for sure by next year, and unless I was willing to spill my guts to them about whether I was or not, why then I could go live in a place of my own.”

“That’s a good rotten thing to tell a guy,” Nate said.

“So I told him I’d get out right now. And I did. I’ve got some money. I’ll go to the Y.”

“How the hell much chance does he think he’s giving you or your analysis,” Nate went on, “with that kind of threat hanging over you? Christ”

Margie knelt down on one knee so that her face was on a level with Jeff’s. “Jeffie, you’ve got us, whatever happens. And Mama too, I bet.”

His hand went out toward her shoulder, but he didn’t touch it and he didn’t look at her.

“You can live with us,” she said. “You just move in here.”

“I can’t. I’m going to cut loose from Yale and get a job and not take one cent off that bastard for the rest of my life.”

“You can still live with us to start with. In that room next to Lynnie’s room. We’ll stack the junk up at one side and put in an army cot.”

Jeff looked at her as if he had never seen her before. Maybe he never had, he thought, you never look at your sister. Her bright dark eyes surprised him, her hair, thick and springing in a way he had never noticed before, her mouth too, strong and full. He had never noticed any of it, her own special face; though he would have recognized her instantly in any street, in any city anywhere in the world, he had never really seen her as a person before, only as part of his family.

Was the same thing true of the way he saw his brother Don? His mother? His goddamn father?

Suddenly his throat knotted and he began to cry, a convulsive sobbing, his body twisting away so that his face burrowed into the back of the armchair. They both stood back in silence. In a gesture to Margie, Nate put his index finger to his lips and went to the bookcase, whose lower shelf acted as their only bar. He poured two inches of Bourbon into a short wide glass and took it back to Jeff. “Here, boarder,” he said. “Grab one on the house.”

Jeff looked up and suddenly laughed, a burst of laughter. His fingers massaged his face into smooth lines again, as if he had just taken off his football helmet. “I could just use that.” He knocked back half of it, then gulped and coughed. “Beer’s my speed, but I’m sure glad to get this.”

“I’d be glad too,” Margie said to Nate.

“And me.” He went back to the bookshelf. Their voices were all artificial, too bright, temporary voices for use in crisis. Jeff drank the rest of his Bourbon, coughed again, laughed once more and fell silent. They were being terrific, both of them. He didn’t know what he had expected, but they were terrific. Walking the streets, half running, he hadn’t even planned to come here to their house, and yet the minute the idea sprang into his mind he had fallen in with it, like getting signals at a hot point in a game. All he had known up to then was that he wasn’t going home that night, or any night, that was all that was for sure. He had thought of phoning Pete to ask if he could stay there for the night, but he’d have to explain or make something up, and both things were impossible. He had thought of a hotel, then of the Y. Then Margie and Nate ran across his mind, like the news bulletins flashing around the old building on Times Square. Not Don and Jenny, never Don and Jenny, only Margie and Nate. Don would be nothing like Margie at something like this, even if he was his only brother. He would be nothing like Nate either. He wouldn’t be like the old man of course, but there would be something controlled and way off there about every word Don said and every word he did not
say.

He had never thought that of Don before, but now he was positive. There was something so collected about Don, so regular, so orthodox—God, he was beginning to get measurements of people whom he had never once tried to measure before. Out of your own awful try at measuring yourself, holding that goddamn yardstick up to your own life, figuring, sizing yourself up, you started to get a whole new yield of data on other people too.

Nate had come back with a drink for Margie and one for himself. He had put ice cubes in both of them, Jeff noticed, and water too, neither of which he had bothered with for him. They both sat down, Margie on the floor near the big old sofa, Nate in the sofa, his right arm over the back of it, relaxed and easy. They were waiting for him to go on, Jeff knew, but all at once he felt queasy, just a touch, but enough to make the sweat start inside his shirt.

“Can I say one thing, Jeff?” Nate asked.

“Anything.”

“Just this one thing. It’s nobody’s goddamn business what you are, now or a year from now or ten years from now. Not your father’s, not your mother’s, not mine or Margie’s, not even what’s-his-name’s, your doctor’s. If you believe that, you’ll have at least one guy who agrees with you. Me.”

Jeff squinted a little, concentrating. He looked down at his sister, then back to Nate. “You don’t think it matters, one way or another?”

“Sure it matters. It’s a lousy life if you’re homosexual these days. It wasn’t always, it wasn’t in ancient Greece, but it sure is today. But that’s your business, or it would be once you get to be twenty-one years old and an official ‘adult,’ and it’s nobody else’s business, not your father’s or mother’s or the cops that go around bars, rounding up guys like cattle.”

“‘Rounding them up like cattle.’” Jeff said it with emphasizing quotes around it “You nearly killed me with that, at our house for Thanksgiving. That was the first time I ever heard of the Wolfenden Report, the first time I ever knew anybody felt it might be just nobody else’s business.”

“I haven’t changed my mind. Neither has Wolfenden. Neither have a whole lot of other people. It’s a kind of growing thing. You’ll see.”

“You don’t mean I shouldn’t try another year with Dr. Dudley?”

“Of course you should try another year or five more years. I said that the way things are now, it’s a rotten deal, and who wouldn’t try to get away from a rotten setup if there’s any goddamn way he can steer clear of it? But that’s
all
meant and all I’ll ever mean.”

There was a pause. Jeff said nothing, and Nate felt his own words alive about them. At last Margie said, “Jeff, I’ll call Mama and say you’re staying here. She must be scared stiff by now.” Jeff started to answer, but instead set his empty glass down hard on the table and said, “I’ll be back in a minute.” He raced to the bathroom and they could hear the spasms of his vomiting. They looked at each other, and Margie put her hand out to cover Nate’s.

J
UST AS THE YEAR 1960
would forever be for Tessa not the year when Kennedy defeated Nixon and became President, but the year when Jeff wrote his letter, just as 1961 would be not the year when man first orbited the earth, but the year when Jeff left home, so each segment of the next long period of living, 1962, ’63, ’64, became for her a twofold experience, one the world’s, the other her own within it, the private memory encapsulated into the public One as the hidden pulsing heart is encapsulated into the visible outer flesh.

She had always had a good memory, one that often astonished—or vexed—other people whose own memory was faulty, and sometimes she was vain about her ability to recall dates, names, exact phrases of speech. But in these years of the early Sixties she came to hate her memory, hate its tenacity, the accuracy with which it gave her again and again the sight and sound of scenes she had already lived through and would not elect to endure again.

She tried to blur some of these memories, consciously attempted to erase or at least dull them, tried like some perverse photographer to get them out of focus, haze them over. With some she succeeded, but there were others that defied her, that remained clear, sharp, and with them an undimmed tape bearing voices, also clear, the words distinct, the inflections unchanged.

One such ineradicable memory was that last scene between Ken and Jeff. A thousand times over, the rising voices came back to her, the anger as they faced each other across the table, the awful finality as Jeff hurled shut the door behind him, that furious young voice saying, “I’ll cut loose right now.”

Until Margie had telephoned late that evening, she had been so distracted by fear of what Jeff might do in his first wild rage that she could think of nothing else. Bizarre notions had crowded in upon her: he would barge crazily into traffic and be hit by a car, he would leap from the highest span of the George Washington Bridge, he would hurl himself from some friend’s penthouse window.

“I didn’t mean it the way he took it,” Ken had finally said, addressing the blind silence of the room. “All I meant was that if he were going to go on acting as if his analysis was none of our business, for another year and maybe another year after that, why then, maybe he’d want to cut loose from the family in other ways too.”

She had nodded, as if she accepted his contrition, but afterward, that same evening, when Margie had said Jeff would be living with them for a while, she had behaved outrageously.

“Whatever way you ‘meant it,’” she had stormed at Ken, “the result is the same. You, a great big liberal civilized man, you threw him out because you can’t stand the idea of your son being homosexual.” Her own voice had risen, shrewish. “Your son, yours. Anybody else’s son or daughter, okay, that’s nothing, let us understand life and nature and remain decent But
your
son?”