Daughters of the Revolution (6 page)

Oceanic depths the cup that holds our tears.

Mei-Mei thought my father’s death was a story about accidents, threats, loss, abandonment, risk. “Be careful,” she used to tell me when, at fourteen or fifteen, I went out nights in cars with boys. “Don’t die,” she said.

My first real memories are those years after my father died when Mei-Mei and I used to wait for the Boston Strangler to knock on our door. We waited for night, for the high sound of his car in our driveway, his engine cut, his foot on the stair. We lived in an apartment in one of the old three-story houses near the Four Corners, named for the four corner gas stations that competed there: Esso, Shell, Mobil and another one—Sinclair, now reorganized, or defunct, whose emblem even then was a dinosaur. Most of the houses like ours, once fortresses of the middle class, had become apartment buildings; mostly women lived in them—women with children, women alone. Our apartment occupied the third floor. The rent: $110 a month. The fenced yard kept me near; she wouldn’t let me go anywhere without her, afraid someone might steal me.

At night, we ate tiny fried fish with their bones and Mei-Mei played a love song on her guitar—four chords, same song—and
I lay in bed, shimmering with terror because my father was a tiny dead man in the window.

Sometimes I woke up in the dark and couldn’t breathe. Mei-Mei turned on the shower and filled the bath with steam. Even now, wasted hot water reminds me of love.

Nobody knew how the Strangler did it. There was no sign of his entering apartments by force. For some reason we didn’t understand, the women let him in.

Friday evenings, Mei-Mei and I sat on the twin bed in her room with our backs up against the wall and watched
The Addams Family
on her black-and-white Philco TV. Even though
The Addams Family
was a comedy about a family of ghoulish people—a cousin made of hair, a Thing who was a hand—they didn’t fool me. Compared with us, the Addamses were a dream family: extensive, intimate, affluent and serene.

Sometimes a car turned into the driveway. Mei-Mei jumped up from the bed. “Jesus God, who can that be?” She clutched the window frame and stole looks outside. It was always the O’Greefes, who lived downstairs.

Once while I was reading, someone knocked at the front door. I stood up and Mei-Mei ran into the room and knocked me over. She held me down as if I might try to break away. “Who’s there?” she called out.

A woman’s voice: “I am from the Bureau of the Census.”

“We can’t let you in,” Mei-Mei said. But she let me go. She stood with her mouth up to the closed door, answering the census taker’s questions. It looked like whispers and kissing.

The best and most important memories aren’t necessarily happy ones; moments of distress sometimes surround moments of bliss. When I cried over some large or small humiliation, Mei-Mei never said “Shh,” or “Everything is going to be all right.” She just let me lie in her arms in the yellow light from the paper lantern above her bed.

Mei-Mei loves other people’s tragedies: She defends their
sad stories; no detail is too shocking or personal. Before she took over the French classes, the previous teacher having been fired for moral turpitude following a sex scandal, Mei-Mei used to teach English literature at Wilde High. Every year she read
The Scarlet Letter
with her students and told them the story of our very own Hester Prynne, Mrs. O’Greefe, whose husband abused her. (He once bit off part of her breast.) Mei-Mei taught her students about the symbolism of what Mrs. O’Greefe had done. (She had had her own nipple grafted onto her forehead.) For Mei-Mei, Mrs. O’Greefe was a hero, a sensual woman trapped in the purlieus of Cape Wilde who turned her oppression by forces of stupidity, poverty and violence into a badge of honor, or at least into a badge.

Once, Mei-Mei made a cake that exploded, and a spray of chocolate stuck to the ceiling forever. Our fear, too, was a mark that never disappeared, even when the Strangler confessed and went to prison, where he was assassinated; even when we moved. It’s all still vivid, the chocolate on the ceiling and the cozy nightmare Mei-Mei and I shared. During the commercials, we remembered how the Strangler murdered women with their own bathrobe cords and their own nylons tied in terrible bow ties around their necks. We would keep him out; we would never let him in. Our life was almost like a game. Before we went to bed, we stood empty bourbon and milk bottles in front of the door, then waited in the night to hear glass break.

G
od despised the telephone, and had no choice but to use the thing. He shouted down the wire to Heck Hellman’s widow, “Better come by Thursday afternoon and have a drink.”

He had no doubt she’d come when he called, appear at his civilized house on Cape Wilde. Women craved luxury. They were curious and liked to talk. Her husband, Heck, had been one of the great Goode boys—not a scholar particularly, but a first-rate athlete. He’d died five years ago in a boating accident. She never remarried, a tragedy; finally, God had thought of a way to help her.

Looking forward to the appointment, he bathed and deployed bay rum. He put on khaki pants, a striped shirt and a bow tie, feeling like Marlow among the cannibals, not wanting to appear unappetizing. He drove to Maidenhead for a bottle of gin—a necessary trip from dry Cape Wilde. He made ice.

By early afternoon, God lay in his chair, eyes closed, reviewing his position. It pained him to be dismissed as a moth-eaten conservative, an antifemale chauvinist, a reactionary fogy. But he drew the line at girls at Goode, had opposed them to the end. “Over my dead body”—he may have said it two or three times.

Goode had begun as a seminary to train ministers—the grandsons of rebels from the Church of England—in a time when this goal represented an ideal neither diverse nor ecumenical. (We are all, God felt, children of some revolution.) Coeducation was not simply a problem of
including girls
, whatever that idea could come to mean; it was the other language—about
creating a more socially and culturally relevant curriculum—
that troubled him. What did the school stand for, after all, but a certain kind of boy—who presented himself to God’s imagination in the image of Heck Hellman or Archer Rebozos—whose character was forged on the playing field, whose soul was enlarged (but not falsely puffed up) by literature and language, whose mind was sharpened by mathematics and science, whose spirit was tuned by daily hours in chapel to the profound mysteries of life, whose manners at table were stiffened like lightly starched napkins by years of French service at the evening meal? Even if on the surface God’s boys resembled regular boys of the era, with their long hair and woozy airs, they were at heart conservative in the Goode School tradition—boys in possession of traditions worth conserving.

Still, Postover and Mellon-Hardgraves had brought girls in. The new, mercenary board of trustees naturally feared females straying into the boys’ rooms—and worse—but had already made the fatal financial decision. Times were changing. Goode was like the besieged South Vietnamese city of Ben Tre: It had become necessary to destroy the school in order to save it.

Heck Hellman’s wife appeared at five in a skirt and tall boots. She stood under the wisteria vine that had devoured and become the pillars of the porch: beaky nose, upright bosom, untamed brown mane. “Call me Mei-Mei,” she said, and stuck out her hand to shake. Her fresh aspect under the hoary branches reminded him that even as he prepared to step aside—the call for “mandatory retirement” at sixty-five still rang in his ears—new grass had grown under his feet. He would show them, take a bold last stand; he would call his work
In Defense of Boys: A Last Stand Against the Adoption of Coeducation at the Goode School
. He only really needed someone to type it.

“Come in,” he said. “Give me your sweater. Sit down.”
He mistrusted her enough that he became, if anything, more courtly. “I want to offer you a special cocktail—the world’s oldest soft drink—a
sha-rub.
”

They went together to the kitchen. He located glasses, and the raspberry syrup, the vinegar mix, the fizzy water. He made a production.

“Arabic,” she said.

“I’m afraid I’m a bit of an Orientalist. Splash of gin?”

“Oh, yes.”

He told a few self-deprecating stories, including a hint of why his wife had left him—unbridled vitality!—then pulled back. He laid his hands down on the table in front of him, looked meditatively at the veins.

“Heck was one of the great boys of Goode,” he said. “I remember him perfectly, an epitome.” His eyes misted over, speaking of the old days, the old boys, Heck. “I did not invent the form,” he told Mei-Mei, “though I may have played some part in perfecting the model.”

This was part of what he hoped to show in his book. “Did I tell you the name of it?
In Defense of Boys.
” He described the models he’d built on, the boys he’d turned out, the men he had helped to forge in the smithy of his school. More than that, he was uniquely positioned to give a history of the century, with which he had almost perfectly coexisted—the who, what, when, where and why—a history that might otherwise be lost.

“It is, among other things, a story about formidable women,” he assured her. His first memory as a boy was of sitting under the piano on a Persian rug in short pants, and the rug scratching his knees. His aunt Olympia swept into the room wearing a broad, complicated hat; her eye slid over him. Summers, his father let him go out alone along the shores of Squantum, first in a dory, then in his own twelve-foot sloop. Aunt Olympia saved his life once when he swamped: She swam to him and hauled
him home. He remembered rhododendrons, peonies, boatyard rats, slipping into the cinema and spending his Sunday nickel for church. Then school: He was sent away and wet his bed. The mattress was publicly aired. The first Negro pupil, Ames, had a gold tooth and brought his girl to a dance one time. Up until then, everyone admired a man on his merits, no matter his race. But they could not bring themselves to admit the couple into their circle, and Ames left the dance with a cold air. God did not speak up at the time, and the incident shamed him.

He felt now, more than ever, a compulsion to communicate, and dreaded the loss of voice that death might bring.

“What’s this music?” Mei-Mei asked.

“Verdi’s Requiem,” he told her. “Memory of Heck.”

“It’s just loud—the trumpets.”

She stood up, crossed the living room and turned down the music. She came back and sat beside him. Beneath the tidy line of her skirt, her knees did not quite touch. “I’d like to help you, Mr. Byrd,” she said. “I can type sixty-five words a minute.”

Their work began well; Mei-Mei seemed charmed by the Underwood in the bonny nook upstairs, content in God’s realm. She had another job, teaching English in the local high school, and came to him in the early evenings and on weekends. Sometimes after she transcribed a section of his notes, he would feed her a glass of gin and listen to her talk. “Heck and I made love the night before he died. When I heard he’d drowned, I couldn’t see my life anymore. It just went dim. I hoped I was pregnant. And I prayed—prayed!—I was not. I couldn’t sleep, the conflict of these two desires was so intense. I have never wanted—and not wanted—anything so much since then.”

God was relieved to hear her speak frankly of desire. When he eventually revealed himself, she was not instantly repelled,
and he felt grateful for those aspects of women that he found so admirable: their courtesy and almost natural ability to minimize the discomfort and awkwardness of being old bones in a body. He peeled away his khaki pants and shorts, revealed his rotund paunch, his sagging thighs, his full preparedness for engagement (!) even as he acknowledged to himself a minor note of disappointment (how many torch songs raveled out on that minor note?) that she had been so easy a summit to conquer. The thought didn’t shame him—why should it? He had no reason to worry about any invasion of the private sphere of his mind (because his mind was like a First World nation—protected, defended), and lascivious thoughts ran like gold through the gutters. He was grateful that she showed no sign of being repelled by his aged carcass, and only mildly sorry that she was not just slightly younger, in a tighter stage of bud.

“Well?” he said. “Shall we put it in?”

“I want you to,” she said tragically.

They fucked in silence on the Persian gabbeh in the bonny nook. Mei-Mei came, then God.

Mei-Mei wept; she typed. She typed all night and words came out. She had to tell Heck’s story; she wrote. “Every sentence must be just so,” God had said, “before you can go on.” He was important; she typed. Every sentence must be just so; she wept. She made the imperfect sentences disappear, until nothing remained and the story—his story (also in some important way
her
story)—was like perfect sentences written in milk on a white page: not a shadow of the story, but a page too white to read. In this way, she tried to create by deleting, making the man come alive even as he receded and dissolved.