Equal Affections
Authors: David Leavitt
For John Leavitt and Emily Leavitt
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
âW. H. AUDEN,
“The More Loving One”
Also Available by David Leavitt
T
he first time Louise thought she was dying she called Danny and April to the side of her hospital bed and said, “Listen, kids, there's something I want to say to you both,” April, who had just turned sixteen, shook out her long hair and said, “Oh, Mom, come on!” but Danny knew to stay quiet.
“No, I'm serious,” Louise said. “Now I know I've done some things you haven't liked, like not letting you go to that concert, April, because it was too late, or Danny, not letting you go see
Rosemary's Baby
. But you have to understand, I had my reasons. Just remember as you get older, everyone is somebody's child, but only some people are somebody's mother.” She reached to rearrange her pillow, inadvertently pulling the IV tube taut against her arm. “Oh, damn it,” she said, “Nat, can you help me with this goddamned bed, I can never get it right.”
From where he sat in the vinyl corner armchair, grading papers, Nat bounded up; he felt most useful when operating machinery. He cracked his fingers and began to manipulate the buttons on the bed's control panel. “A little higher,” Louise said as the bed shifted and whirred. “Now a little lower.”
“Mom,” April said, “I know that being a mother is hard, I know that.”
“Well, sometimes you've acted like you resent me, sweetheart, and I just couldn't bear it ifâ”
“But I understand! You have to make decisions which are good for us, even if we don't like them. I've always understood that.” She took her mother's hand and said, “I love you, Mom,” and both of them, quite suddenly, started to cry. “Well, I guess I just wanted to say I love you too, sweetheart,” Louise said. “I had to get it off my chest, that's all. Danny, can you hand me a kleenex?” She blew her nose. Emotions, in her case, usually expressed themselves in a digestive or respiratory manner. She was forty-four years old.
But as it turned out, she wasn't dying. The disease was to travel along its serpentine route for nine more years, without Louise having to think again that she was dying. Illness moved into their house like an elderly aunt in a back bedroom. It lived with them; it sat at the kitchen table with them; it became ordinary.
Still, there was, from then on, for each of them, a dividing line, a before and after. Certain indestructible details bore into their long-term memories. For Louise it was the morning shower when she first felt the lump in her breast; for Nat the piece of pink notepaper on which the department secretary had written, “Call Mrs. Cooper immediately”; for April the surprising silence of the house when she got home from school that day and found no one was home. And for Danny it was when he got called away from Mr. Weston's classâthey were doing American Indiansâand in the school office the secretary said, “Danny, your dad called to say your mom won't be able to pick you up for your dentist's appointment, your sister's coming.” April arrived at the appointed time, driving Louise's car, and Danny knew something was seriously wrong. April had had her license only two weeks; under normal circumstances she was not allowed to drive Louise's car.
“Don't get us in a crash!” Danny said as they pulled out of the school parking lot, and April said, “Will you relax? I got ninety-eight on my test, I know what I'm doing.” He never understood why she chose the middle of traffic to tell him, but April was given to rash and impractical strategies. “Danny,” she said, “Mommy had to go to the hospital today. You see, she found a lump in her breast, and they have to take it out, but it's probably nothing, nothing to worry about.” And before he could say anything, before he could think of a question or beg for reassurance, she herself had burst into a fit of weeping so hard that her hands shook and the car veered onto the shoulder. “April, don't drive now!” Danny said. “Pull over!” “I'm fine!” April screamed. “I'm fine!”
Control would never be her strong point. A long time later, when Danny told her he was gay, her answer was, “Well, Danny, all I can say is, you'd better tell Mom and Dad tonight, because if you don't, I just know I won't be able to help telling them myself.” Almost apologetically she said this, as if her actions were entirely determined by demons switching circuits in her brain. The best she could do, it seemed, was offer a little advance warning.
___________
The second time Louise thought she was dying was altogether different. A somber, muddled moment; there were to be no pronouncements, no bedside offerings. She was sitting with Danny in the lunchroom of Neiman-Marcus, watching him eat a sandwich called the Towering Pagodaâneatly quartered stacks of toast, bacon, turkey, and water chestnut, speared with orientalized decorative toothpicks. It was the end of August. Nat was away; April was away. The last afternoons of summer sizzled toward increasingly early sunsets, each one bringing the flip of the calendar one day closer. All around them people were battling incipient end-of-season nostalgia with back-to-school shopping, new clothes, course catalogues, and white sales, but Danny and Louise, as every year, seemed somehow to have been left behind by all the activity, their feet frozen in the regretful muck, the sodden dregs of a summer passed over too quickly, not sufficiently appreciated or enjoyed. Nat always managed to get a business trip this time of year, some chatting to a corporation and a few quick fucks at the Inter-Continental Marriott Sheraton Hilton Comfort Inn. (Louise's joke.) And April too was somehow always away; even better than Nat, she had managed to disengage herself from the calendar altogether, to find a way of living and working entirely outside seasonal time clocks. So it was just Louise and Danny, as usual, at the end of August, eating at the Neiman-Marcus lunchroom together as they never had before and never would again, and Louise, for the second time in her life, thinking she was dying. This time she had known better than to share with anyone the lump, the biopsy, the barium, the upside-down
machine, and the phone call she would make in the morning to find out the results. Danny, slumped in his chair, bit lethargically into his Towering Pagoda, as if to say, nothing will make this time better. Around them ice clinked in the iced tea glasses of rich-looking women, there was the soothing sound of low voices discussing diets, televised infidelities, the ailments of the wives of the world's richest men.
___________
As it turned out, though, she was to be spared again. “Good news!” said the doctor over the phone. Still sick, but not dying. Danny, despite protests, went to eleventh grade. Nat came home. She was fifty-three years old.
___________
Once, when Danny was home visiting, he went with his mother to a knitting shop. They walked together along the sun-brightened sidewalks of California Avenue, past the Fine Arts Theatre, Round Table Pizza, La Caniche Pet Shoppe, Country Sun Natural Foods. Louise was wearing baby-blue jeans, ladies' jeans, with flowers on the hips, and a fuzzy yellow cardigan sweater. “You know, Danny,” she said, “most people say being old is so tough, but as I get older, I think more and more, being old is great. You relax, you don't worry so much about things, you don't have to work so hard. And best of all, you know so much you didn't know when you were young.”
“Mom,” Danny said, “don't be ridiculous. You're not old.”
“And the discounts! At movies, on buses. I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying the discounts.”
“You don't deserve them,” Danny said, and throwing his hand out hit her hard, on the forearm. Instantly a bruise bloomedâred pigment spreading fast under her skin.
“Oh, I hit you!” he said.
She shrugged. “It's nothing,” she said. “Just subcutaneous bleeding.”
Just! In his clumsiness he reached out to take her arm and inadvertently struck her again. “Danny!” she said. Another red welt, the size of a half-dollar, burst under the skin of her wrist. “Careful now.” Neatly she tugged down her sleeve. “I'm sorry,” he said. But she said, “Oh, it's nothing. I get these all the time.”
They went to the knitting store. It was a dusty place, full of pattern magazines and wall nooks crammed with skeins of yarn arranged according to the color spectrum. At a big elementary school table women sat working long pink needles, drinking coffee, thumbing through magazines. She joined the circle; even though the women were strangers, they spoke together intimately, in low tones. Louise was looking for an outfit to make for a friend's soon-to-be-born grandchildâsince a couple of years ago she had stopped mentioning hope for one of her ownâleafing through photographs of yellow sweater jumpers, booties, elegant gray suits for little boys, hats patterned with ducks. She rolled up her sleeves, revealing two delicate, freckled forearms alarmingly patterned with dark red spirals and circles, splotches of blood, like army camouflage clothing. She was sixty-one years old.
___________
As a child, Danny was shy and careful, at least where his mother was concerned. Once, when he was about six, alarmed by the photographs of cancerous lungs his teacher had shown in the antismoking slide show at school, he hid all her cigarettes. For an hour that evening she searched the house, looking under pillows and cushions, emptying trash cans, even going through the freezer. Then she noticed him watching her. “Did you do something with my cigarettes?” she said, and he stood before her, frozen.
“Tell me where they are,” she said.
“It's bad to smoke.”
“Tell me where the hell you put my cigarettes or you are going to get it, young man.”
“It's bad to smoke.”
“I'm warning you, Danny.”
“In my play chest.”
He followed her to his room, watched her open the chest and pull the toys out with unruly violence. “Jesus Christ,” she said as she ripped the plastic off the carton of cigarettes, “don't any of your teachers give you lessons on minding your own business?” She stood hunched over, trying to light the cigarette in the hollow of her hand even as she chastised him, and he observed with some curiosity her struggles with the lighter. Finally the flame caught. She took a long, desperate puff, blew smoke toward the open window. As she smoked, she kept one arm crossed over her chest and would not look at him.
She smoked six more years, until the first surgery compelled her to quit. In the interval Danny never again touched the big red cartons Louise kept stacked in the cabinet beneath the napkin drawer, nor did he consider doing so. He had learned that afternoon what tender and desperate things his mother's needs were; that they could not be treated lightly, or cavalierly dispensed with. From then on, he knew, he would have to find more secret, undercover ways to protect her, ways that she would never recognize.
W
hen Nat Cooper was in sixth grade, in 1935, he wrote a paper called “My Family Tree Grows Nuts.” “The Cooper Family Tree has few roots and many branches,” his paper began, and it was true: ten daughters and two sons, born to Max and Nettie, who had come over from Lithuania. Max had to dress as a girl to escape the draft; he pretended he was his wife's sister. As for their own parents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, no one seemed to know anything. Presumably they were all dead in the pogroms. Max and Nettie were a sapling, a single branch cut off and transplanted in a warmer climate. Their twelve children had forty-three children; their forty-three grandchildren had sixty more children. Very few of them were left in Boston, however, most having moved south, to Florida, or, like Nat, west.