Read Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle Online
Authors: Michael Thomas Ford
"He's going to be fine, but his injuries are extensive," he said. "In addition to a broken nose, he has a punctured lung, several cracked ribs, a shattered tibia, and numerous contusions. We've stitched him up and fixed everything we can. Now it's up to his body to do the rest."
"Not now," he answered. "He's heavily sedated anyway, so he wouldn't even know you were there. But I'm sure he'll be happy to see a friendly face when he wakes up. Come by around eleven. He should be up by then."
Dr. Stanislaus walked off, leaving me alone. I looked at my watch. It was almost five-thirty. The whole night had slipped by, and suddenly I felt the accumulated weight of worry and lack of sleep. I closed my eyes as exhaustion washed over me. Where was Andy? Then I remembered. He was calling Brian. Well, I thought, he'd be back soon. Then I would tell him that Jack was going to be okay. Jack was going to be okay. He was. The doctor had promised. I would tell Andy when he came back. I just needed to rest for a minute. Then we could go home. I sighed deeply, and a moment later, I was asleep.
Giving your mother away at her wedding is, I think, one of the odder experiences a son can have. As I walked mine down the aisle and handed her off to Walter Jacobsen, I wondered what my father would think of the man my mother was marrying. Walter was a quiet man, and from what I could tell, he treated my mother well. Most of all, she was happy. When she'd called a few weeks earlier to tell me she was getting married, I'd been surprised. It had only been eight months since I'd met Walter at Thanksgiving, and I'd barely gotten used to the idea of my mother dating, let alone marrying. Now I was sitting in the front pew at Ebenezer Lutheran Church watching her exchange vows with a man I barely knew.
My mother's mother, Violet Renard O'Reilly, was a tiny woman, almost elfin, with the dark eyes of her French-Canadian ancestors and the personality of her maiden surname. She'd met my grandfather, Seamus O'Reilly, at the age of 19 while working for Canadian National Railways in 1926. My grandfather, seven years her senior and a doctor with an appointment at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, was on his way to a conference at McGill University in Montreal when he realized, to his dismay, that he had left the notes for his lecture on the train, which had already left the station on its way to Trois-Rivières.
Rushing to the ticket window, he came face-to-face with a raven-haired beauty who took pity on his miserable attempts at explaining in grade-school French what had happened. In perfect English, my grandmother told him not to worry and radioed the station at Drummondville to request that the young doctor's notes be returned on the next westbound train. As thanks, my grandfather offered to take her to supper, an invitation she refused on the grounds that it would hardly be proper. But he could not forget the lovely young woman, and after giving his lecture the next day, he'd returned to the station and asked her again if she would dine with him. This time she agreed, later saying that during the night she'd made a deal with the Virgin Mary that if the handsome American came to her a second time, she would consider it a sign.
Their courtship was conducted largely by letter, with my grandfather making a handful of visits to Montreal over the next six months to try to gain the acceptance of my grandmother's family, who were deeply suspicious of his Irish heritage but liked the idea of Violet marrying a physician. Ultimately, my grandfather's medical degree trumped his ancestry, and in October of 1927, the eldest of the three Renard daughters became the first member of her family in three hundred years to leave Quebec when she was brought to Chicago and ensconced in a house on Aldine Avenue in the city's Lake View neighborhood. A son was born a year later, and my mother two years after that. Violet and Seamus's marriage was a happy one, but the male O'Reillys were unlucky. My mother's brother, called Killian, died at the age of six from rheumatic fever. My grandfather followed him in 1946, four years before my birth, felled by a heart attack while lunching with colleagues visiting from New York's Bellevue Hospital. Violet, having lost her son and husband by the age of 39 (and her soldier brother to suicide the year before), decided that she would not invite further heartbreak, and vowed never to remarry. She also discouraged my mother from taking a husband, and when a few years later my mother met and fell in love with my father, Violet did her best to talk her daughter out of it. Failing in this, a week after the wedding she moved back to Montreal, claiming that despite her bargain with the Blessed Mother, her bad luck was due to having left the city of her birth in the first place. For the duration of my parents' marriage, she had not crossed the border into the United States, fearing disaster if she did. As a result, I knew her mostly through letters, phone calls, and anecdotes told to me by my mother. I had seen her only a few times in person, when my parents took me to see her in Canada. The last time had been more than ten years before. My mother, recalling the tragedy of her uncle's death, had not informed Violet of my time in the army, and so she remained ignorant of my experiences in Vietnam, believing me to have been too busy at college to correspond. When my father died, Violet had been forced to reexamine her theory about the nature of the curse she believed to be upon her. As she'd not placed one toe over the line between her country and ours in thirty years, she felt she could hardly be held responsible for her son-in-law's early demise. Although some of her family suggested that the legacy of her youthful indiscretion might very well have been transferred to her daughter, she rejected that as unfair and mean-spirited on the part of the fates. At any rate, she said, if it was the case, there was nothing she could do about it now, and as her subsequent behavior would apparently have no effect on the outcome anyway, she declared her exile over. Seated beside me, she watched, sharp-eyed, as Walter and my mother exchanged vows. Oddly, the fact that my mother had abandoned Catholicism early on, and was marrying for the second time in a Protestant church, didn't seem to bother her in the slightest. I suspect now that she might have considered it deserved retribution against Mary for misleading her all those years ago, but if so, she kept her feelings to herself.
As the only guests were myself, my grandmother, the Graces, and Walter's daughter from his previous marriage (a fat, sour girl named Candace who still resented her father for divorcing her mother twenty years earlier), after the ceremony we had dinner at a nearby restaurant in lieu of a reception. I found myself seated between Candace and Patricia Grace. Since Candace apparently felt I shared some of the blame for her father's remarrying, she ignored me, concentrating fully on stabbing the peas on her plate with obvious hostility and drinking far too much wine. That left me to converse with Jack's mother, a situation I found almost as uncomfortable as having to sit beside my new stepsister.
This was all a lie. Jack didn't have an internship anywhere. He was in the guest bedroom on Lower Terrace, where he'd been for the past six weeks, ever since the night of his attack. We'd brought him there after a week in the hospital, where he'd needed to stay while the doctors made sure there was no lasting damage from his injuries. When he was able to talk, we'd learned that while walking home he had been approached by three men who asked him for directions to the nearest gay bar. Finding it suspicious that they should be standing only a block away from an obviously busy one and not know it, Jack had ignored their question. Enraged by his silence, the men had encircled him and, before he could call for help, begun beating him. It had all been over in a matter of a minute, and no one had heard anything. The men had vanished into the night, apparently satisfied with claiming one victim. Such violence was not unheard of, even in unusually tolerant San Francisco. And it had increased since March, when the city's Board of Supervisors voted 10 to 1 to pass an historic anti-gay discrimination measure. The lone dissenter in that vote was Dan White, a former police officer and fireman who represented a heavily-Catholic and mostly conservative district. White frequently clashed with the more liberal supervisors, particularly Harvey Milk, and it was rumored that some of White's more ardent supporters were taking revenge for what they saw as a slight against their values by roughing up gay men. Whatever the reasons for his attack, Jack needed time to mend. With Andy going on film shoots and generally being at best a reluctant caregiver, Brian and I had decided to let Jack recuperate at our house. The arrangement had worked out well. While I was at work, Brian was often home, and when he had to attend to business for Kestrel, I was able to be with Jack. And once Jack was able to attend to basic needs for himself and didn't require full-time care, it was almost like having a house guest instead of a patient. I was enjoying having him around, although I wished the circumstances were different. Jack didn't want his parents to know what had happened to him, and so had avoided an appearance at my mother's wedding by telling them that he was doing a summer internship in counseling at a local hospital and couldn't get away. While it was an easy masquerade to maintain, I didn't like lying to his mother, and wanted to avoid talking about Jack as much as possible. In a desperate attempt at extricating myself from such a conversation, I found myself trying to make small talk with Candace.
"How's the chicken?" I asked her.
She glared at me. "Dry," she snarled.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom, where I did a line of coke. Since Andy had introduced me to it, I'd been doing it fairly regularly. I liked the way it took the edge off and made me worry less about things. I also liked how it gave everything a crystalline sharpness, as if I was looking at the world through a lens that brought every detail into focus. Mostly I liked how it made me feel invincible, especially in the aftermath of Jack's attack.
I went back to the table and managed to hold conversations without fear of spilling Jack's secret. Even Candace's glowering didn't dampen my spirits as I toasted my mother and Walter and told stories that had everyone laughing. Later, as we walked out to our cars, my grandmother took me by the arm and said, "You remind me of your grandfather. He was full of life, too." "It's living in San Francisco," I told her. "There's something in the water."
The next day, flying home, I thought about my grandmother and her imagined curse. If there truly was some cosmic whammy hanging over the heads of the men of her bloodstock, I was next in line to be crushed beneath its heel. I pictured my grandfather, grand uncle, uncle, and father looking down on me and taking bets on how and when I would go. Or maybe, I thought, as the only member of the latest generation, I played another role in the ongoing tragedy. If my mother had inherited the curse from her mother, couldn't I then be a carrier as well? Instead of facing death, maybe I was the one who brought death to others. Maybe it was my lovers who should be concerned for their well-being. It was an interesting possibility, but one I was loath to consider, particularly considering Jack's recent misfortune. The idea that the men I opened my heart to might die as a result was far too disturbing. But, I argued, was there not something to the idea? I had loved Andy, and he had nearly died in Vietnam. Now Jack, too, had come close. I was reminded suddenly of the dream I'd had years ago, in which I'd seen Jack lying in a hospital bed and been told he was dying of love. Is this what the centerfold-cum-angel had been trying to warn me about? Despite the ridiculousness of it, I felt myself shiver.
I couldn't wait to see Brian again, to hold him and know that everything was all right. When the plane landed at SFO, I hurried off, weaving through the less-anxious passengers and running to the gate. I looked for Brian's smiling face, and found nothing. He wasn't there to meet me. Nor was he at baggage claim, where I waited what seemed like an eternity for my sole bag to appear, tumbling down the ramp long after most of the other suitcases had been picked up and whisked away. The cab seemed to take forever to make its way down the 280 and into the city, even longer to work its way through rush hour traffic and into the Castro. By the time we reached the house, I was beside myself with worry. I overtipped the driver and fumbled for my keys as I raced to the door. I saw Brian's car in the driveway, which only made me more concerned.
Leaving my bag at the foot of the stairs, I raced up to the second floor. The guest room was the first room I came to, and I looked in, hoping Jack was there and would tell me that everything was okay. Jack was there. He was on his back, the leg with its cast stuck out at an angle. Sitting astride him, Brian was moving up and down, his hand wrapped around his own cock while Jack's filled him from underneath. Neither noticed me standing there. I watched, unable to speak, as Brian came, his cum shooting into the air and raining down on Jack's chest. Jack groaned and lifted his ass in a response with which I was well-acquainted. I waited until they had both ridden out their orgasms, then said, "I guess you forgot I was coming back today."
"Sorry to disappoint you," I told him. I looked at Jack. "Your mom says to tell you she loves you," I said before turning and going back downstairs. As Brian came after me, I picked up my suitcase, opened the front door, and walked out. "I'll be back for the rest tomorrow," I said.