Making Love (24 page)

“Students are tired of putting up with a lot of archaic senseless regulations that have been on the college books for generations. And they're enforced mindlessly, simply because they are on the books,” Conlon replied.
 

“But with all the protestin', you're missin' the reason for bein' at college, which is to learn. Am I right, Father?” Caught red-handed with the drumstick in his mouth, Father Burns merely nodded vigorously.
 

“The colleges simply have to accept change,” Conlon said peremptorily. “What was good enough for our parents isn't good enough for us. They had to have their freedom controlled and restricted because they didn't know how to use it. We do. We're wiser and more sophisticated.” She had a sinking queasy feeling. Was she talking just to talk, without conviction, hypocritical for the sake of controversy? She dropped her eyes, and thought of the mutual fund team who had come to her like pigs to a trough, and for a moment felt she was going to cry—not sentimentally, for lost innocence, but for simple human abuse, which she could no longer generalize about. It had been an event, a fact, personal and indelible in her life.
 

“Going to college used to be a privilege,” Conlon added, “but now it's a right.”
 

Difficult to pin down or define, but Jane sensed a slow change that had taken place in the Conlons' attitude toward their daughter. Or was it the other way around? She hadn't seen any of them since the previous Easter and perhaps she had moved away from them. Affection is constant, love a whore. She didn't love the Conlons any longer.
 

“There's no Freedom without Responsibility.” Joe nodded his head, affirming his capitals. “Everybody's complaining in this country—they want, want, but no one's prepared to work for what they want. Lootin', maimin', riots, give me, give me; not
what can I give.
”
 

“Oh, Dad, you sound like one of Nixon's speechwriters,” Conlon said.
 

An alarmed and irritated silence encompassed her.
 

“I didn't vote for him, but I think he's proved he's worthy. And I'm not ashamed to echo his sentiments.” He waved an arm as though including the universe within the circle made by the knobbly twiglike fingers. “We're all the silent majority.”
 

“I'm tired of silence,” his daughter replied.
 

Joe Conlon angrily pushed his plate away and upset the salt cellar.
 

“This is a time for thanksgiving and we oughta be givin' it. This is the greatest country in the world and we're lucky to be alive and livin' it. I like to think of meself as a progressive man with a modern outlook.”
 

“That you are, Joe,” his wife averred to any doubters.
 

“I've been through the depression, hauled garbage to feed my family, and I hate what's happenin' to my country. I'm on the other side of the fence from Nixon, but good lord the man's tryin' to salvage the wreckage. Any damn fool—excuse me, Father—can see that. Is it wrong not to want your daughter not using narcotics, or marryin' a colored man, or prayin' that she'll get the best possible education she can, and get married and raise a family? You don't have to be Irish or Catholic to want those things. Or havin' the streets safe, so people can walk them? Human life must be protected....”
 

He was drowned out by a chorus of amens.
 

“Kids in the Village usin' hard drugs, and sleepin' with anyone that's got a motorcycle....”
 

“But, Dad, they choose to live that way.”
 

“Look to yourself, Patricia, and explain how someone with an A-minus average suddenly drops to a C-plus. The work gettin' harder?”
 

“Joe, leave her, will you,” Sally said. “This isn't the time—”
 

“I'm her father and this company is her family, and we don't have to hide anything. Chargin' wigs to your mother. Never heard of anythin' so crazy in me life.”
 

“The courses get harder as you go on, Dad,” Erin explained.
 

“I don't agree. How's it that people start at the bottom of the ladder, then rise to the top? By dint of hard work.”
 

“It's all this sex, coming to the surface,” Father Burns observed. “No one's against it; the church is for it, the Pope is, I am, so's your family, Patricia, but we're opposed to excess.” He was ready to launch into his fallen-woman sermon, but Conlon caught him of balance.
 

“The next time I find an attractive man, I'll ask Christ's permission before I do anything foolish,” she said.
 

“You haven't done anything yet?” her mother asked, panicky vows and prayers choking her voice. “You're a good girl, Pat.” She had the good sense to know that twenty-year-old virgins were a luxury, like French goose
pâté
.
 

“Contentious, she is, that's all,” Joe said, dismissing the subject. After all, it was Thanksgiving, and there was something to be thankful for, although he wasn't sure now what it was.
 

 

* * * *

 

The rambling wooden frame house with its endless passages, four floors, and fleet of rooms had a real chance to become a third-rate boarding house, but it was free and clear and Joe had no reason to move into a high-rise or new neighborhood. The house, like Gaul, had been divided among children and grandchildren and would go to them when he and Sally were no longer there to call the shots.
 

Jane went upstairs with Conlon to her girlhood room, an empty chamber of old memories.
 

“I think you were a bit rough on them,” Jane said.
 

“I've seen you with your parents, too.”
 

“I'm a special case.”
 

“You've singled yourself out as a special case.”
 

“I'm suffering from the opposite problem. Too much freedom. I wanted to be told what to do.”
 

“It's frightening....”
 

“What is?”
 

“Getting to know yourself,” Conlon said. “I should feel something about my old room, but all there is is a bed I cried in, a noisy radiator, and the smell of cabbage, which goes to prove one thing—I'm breaking out. I was thinking at dinner that—well, it's crazy but it's true. If I were Mel, I would've done the same thing. Extra piece on the side getting troublesome. Famous Jewish motto about women that's whispered into a boy's ear when he's thirteen.
Use them, abuse them, lose them
.”
 

“Are you going to tell your family you're leaving school?”
 

“I'll write to them in a while.” Her red hair and freckles were aflame with spite. “They're so damned provincial. You don't have to come from Tennessee to be a yokel. You just have to be Irish.”
 

“They're nice, sweet people.”
 

“Jane, I think your parents are, too. So don't be so fucking sentimental.”
 

She noticed a curl of trees and a small fruit arbor in the back garden which the room overlooked, and she could imagine Conlon as a small girl playing out there after school, surrounded by brothers and friends, and doting parents who'd discovered that their youngest, their last, had the brains they'd all been denied.
 

“It must've been fun growing up here.”
 

“Like to change places?” Conlon asked sullenly.
 

“Is that what you really want? I don't think you would've survived.”
 

“What—on charge plates, and a Rolls to take me to school, and a dozen trips to Europe before I was sixteen? It would've killed me. Definitely. As well as a coming-out party at the Plaza, my picture and four addresses in the New York
Times
.” She paused in an attempt to restrain her undefined anger, but failed to control it. “Send out for the blood plasma and my masseuse and maybe that'll fix my overhead smash.”
 

“I'll see you downstairs.”
 

She gripped Jane's arm tightly and then dropped it.
 

“Jane ... I'm sorry. You are a friend. Better than I deserve. It's just that I don't want to wind up with an honors degree teaching civics or become the head of the payroll department in some factory and marrying a junior executive who stays put for the thirty years because of the pension plan. What I loved about Mel was that he'd squander, and I had it drummed into my head to save, save, save. Until I met him, I'd never been in a restaurant with someone who got a decent table. They always had one for me just by the kitchen. And it isn't good enough for me.” She turned away, caught sight of her face in the dust-filled mirror. “Look at that face and all those fucking freckles. Why couldn't I have been born with a big Jewish or Italian nose that could've been fixed?”
 

Jane moved away stealthily, leaving her glued to the unchanging image of herself. Joe Conlon waited for her at the foot of the stairs. Pale blue worried eyes, his faith hurrying away from him, an elusive rabbit on an unceasing hunt. He began innocently enough, unsubtle and awkward, for discipline had never taught him how to hide his feelings.
 

“How's your family, Jane? Saw your father's name in the
Times
at one of those golf tourneys.”
 

“They're fine.” Family always meant Nancy and Jim to her and she couldn't hear the word without thinking it curiously inapplicable. In her mind she sought putative brothers, sisters, obscure cousins, but they didn't exist. Both her parents were only children. “My mother's busy with her charities.”
 

“They get around, don't they?” He faltered, waved her to an armchair, shouted to the next room—hearts were about to begin—that he'd be in shortly. “I daresay the stock market's affected them, too.”
 

“They grin and bear it.”
 

“It's been lean here, what with contributions and that assassin Lindsay. You look fit.”
 

They sat in silence. She knew that he didn't want her to reply to the aimless small talk he'd begun. All the furniture in the room, used only for guests, had a look of careful preservation, like dummy food in a supermarket window. A wall of Conlon's triumphs built to a uniform rectangle reminded Jane and strangers that the house was a monument to her scholastic achievement. A professional exam taker, Conlon had suffered one ninety-eight percent in her statewide tests—in math—and this was disputed against her, for the question had called for working out the problem and not simply the right answer which Conlon provided.
 

“What's wrong with her?” Joe asked. “You're her friend....”
 

Jane hated herself for lying.
 

“She's a little restless.”
 

“Seems to me we're losin' her. Right before my eyes. An' I don't understand the reason for it. We see her rarely as it is. Somethin' we've done?”
 

“No, you haven't got anything to do with it.”
 

“Doesn't make me feel any better, Jane.”
 

Feeble and pleading for light, he wouldn't be reassured, even though he continued to nod in agreement when Jane spoke of student freedom, the virtues of legalized pot, lip-service Catholics. He understood but didn't.
 

Conlon's mother came into the room.
 

“They're askin' if you're playin', Joe.”
 

“In a minute. I'm talkin' to Jane.”
 

Hands on hips, Sally stood over them like a referee holding up play and they stopped, waited for her.
 

“Patricia's awfully touchy tonight,” Sally said. “Is it a problem with a boy or—” she stopped suddenly, finding Delphic truth—"her period? She was always irritable when she came on.”
 

“I don't know,” Jane said.
 

“I don't like askin', but perhaps you could find out.”
 

“If it's a boy or her period?”
 

“Yes, dear. The two sometimes go together. She looks tired and drawn. Rings under the eyes are always a sign—” Conlon appeared in the doorway, carrying a suitcase. “Are you keepin' up with your wheat germ, Patricia?”
 

“Every second I can.”
 

“Seriously, are you?”
 

“Good night, Mother.”
 

“Are they some winter things for school?” Joe asked, looking suspiciously at the old Woolworth suitcase.
 

“Yes, Dad,” she said in a weary voice, then came toward her mother.
 

The red hands held her face. They seemed to be permanently imprinted with a pattern of chilblains and smelled of ammonia. Through the kitchen door, she saw that the turkey was back in the roasting pan, imprisoned in a quicksand of gray fat. Frank sat sullen at the kitchen table, smoking a Camel and drinking coffee. He avoided looking at her, nursing a private grievance.
 

“Say good-bye to your brother.”
 

“Good night, Frank.”
 

“I'll tell you something, Patricia. I don't think it's right to scoff at your own family.”
 

“I can speak my mind.”
 

“Well, dammit, you're getting an education and none of us around here has been that lucky, so you oughta know better.”
 

“You had the chance when you got out of the service.”