The Distinguished Guest (22 page)

“So that’s it?”

“That’s it. That’s the nature of my confusion. That
was
.”

“And you couldn’t talk about it with Lily and Paul.”

“No, I couldn’t. I felt it . . . depressed them, or shocked them, somehow, when I began even to get close to talking about it. The closest I came was with Lily a couple of years
later, after the divorce, when I got beat up. By some black kids.”

“Jesus.” She rocked back in her chair. “Badly?”

“No, not too. Cracked ribs, some loose teeth. I went down fast—there were four or five of them and it seemed like the wisest course. They kicked me a little before they left, in the
ribs, in the head.”

“God, you must have been terrified.”

“No. No, I don’t think I was, once I was hit once or twice. It’s hard to explain.” Here’s what Alan was remembering: his panic in the long teasing moments as they
caught up with him, surrounded him, pretending to be talking casually. “Hey man, hey faggot, where you going? Why you in such a rush?” Their smiling faces, the tension in their forced
relaxation. And the relief, the relief, with the first blow. And the second. “You know, there weren’t so many guns then, so I didn’t really think of that. And they hadn’t
pulled a knife, no one had cut me. It hurt like hell, later, but then . . . I don’t know. Maybe I was in some kind of shock.” He had lain there after they left, tasting the blood in his
mouth, the odd metal flavor of it, listening to their footsteps, their voices, moving farther off, and feeling a deep peace settle on him. “But the point was, Lily was just undone. Not
because I was hurt, but because I might be angry at blacks. She almost literally wouldn’t let me speak.”

“But how did she stop you?”

“Just . . . by talking for me. ‘Now I know you must be feeling this, but I think what you’ll come to see is that.’ And so on.”

“And what did she expect you to ‘come to see’?”

“That they were the victims, of course. Not I.”

“Ah.” Linnett nodded. “And did you?”

“Well.” He grinned. “I did and I didn’t. I mean, I wanted my anger. Not at blacks, but certainly at those particular guys. And I tried to talk about it to Lily, to make
her see that for once, I’d earned a feeling. I really tried to talk. About all the feelings, the foggier ones earlier, and now this one, this clear one. And she was terrified, I could see it
in her face. I mean, I was a person . . . By now I had black
friends
. I mean, I was going to the university high school, which was a little bit integrated anyhow and they were, you know,
really middle-class kids, kids whose lives I finally did understand—and still she couldn’t allow me . . . anything. To lift the curtain one little bit was like tearing it down for Lily.
She just couldn’t allow it. She gave me the party line, and she tried to shut me up. And I’d bought the general argument long since, so I did shut up. I don’t know.” He
shrugged. “And that was how she talked about it to other people too. I heard her. You know, ‘Yes he was hurt, but not too badly, and he understands why these things happen and he
doesn’t blame anyone.’ ”

“How very politically correct.”

“Lily was the queen of political correctness. In that way. And my father too. Paul.” He shrugged. “So you see, I didn’t have a side in either one of their arguments,
because for me the truth . . . No, not the truth. The
issue
, anything worth arguing about, lay elsewhere. And wasn’t allowed.”

“But later on . . . ” She smiled, suddenly, sheepish. “This is coming back to Lily, I’m sorry. Later on . . . Or no, actually.” Her finger touched her mouth.
“
Earlier
than that, it was earlier. Her stand, her position, being sort of against this kind of community organization and that whole black power thing, that wasn’t politically
correct, was it?”

“No, no. Though she had a few friends who supported her. But no, she swam against the tide on that one. And it cost her a lot. A whole lot. ‘Cause that’s the way liberal
politics were going then. And certainly the church was, our church was going that way. You know, Alinsky and all that. I mean, in effect, it cost her her whole community at church. Certainly the
marriage, in some ways. And she got called a lot of names, implicitly or explicitly, for standing up to all that. Even when she wrote the memoir. I give her credit.”

“Reluctantly.”

He grinned. “It’s hard for me to feel exuberant about Lily.”

“You don’t much like her, do you?”

“Ah.
Like
her.” He frowned, smiling slightly. “I don’t think of it in those terms, I guess.” Then he sat forward and was suddenly serious, looking down
unseeing at his drawings on the table below him. “Lily is . . . she’s phenomenal, really. I admire her, what she’s done with her life, the
use
she’s made of it, I
guess.” He shrugged and met Linnett’s eyes. “I may even be envious of some of that. What I know is that I don’t think of my own life the same way. At all. I don’t wish
to
make use
of it. Or to have
Lily
make use of it, for that matter. But in some—I don’t know—not very intimate way, I would say I even love Lily. There’s a
deep, serious connection, based on how I understand her.” He smiled again. “If I do.”

Now he shook his head, relaxing back in his chair again. “But there are so many things about her I dislike. And some of them I can’t forgive her for. As I said.”

After a moment, Linnett said, “It must be tough living with her now.”

“It’s pretty bad. I hadn’t thought it was going to be, honestly. I thought I’d made my peace, now that I’m a grown-up.” He smiled sardonically.

“So why are you doing it? Why didn’t you ask your sister to?”

“Clary?” He shook his head. “No way would she do it. She said that loud and clear. And she’d gone to Chicago and done all the work, you know, getting Mother ready to move
into the center, which then had to be postponed. So I owed her. But believe me, Clary has maybe even more trouble with Lily than I do.”

“And did your other sister? Did Rebecca?”

“I’m not sure. You know, she was older than Clary. She was out in the world even earlier, and much less interested in me, so I knew much less about her, even then.” He laughed
quickly. “I think she pretty much had contempt for all of us, the whole bourgeois troop. Except she was interested in the radical stuff my father was doing, so she probably did have . . .
Well, she probably joined the argument against my mother. If she cared that much. I suspect Christianity was pretty irrelevant to her.”

“Do you ever hear from her?”

“Rebecca? No. Clary does, every couple of years, and there are sometimes messages—greetings, really—for me. They were pretty close.” He looked at her. “None of this
is what you wanted to know.”

“Oh it helps. It all goes into the hopper.”

“But it doesn’t get at what went on between my parents. Which is where you started.”

“But you
did
offer me your theory.”

He bowed, a little inclination of his head. “Correct. Which, of course, you will not use.”

“No. I swear.”

His eyes met hers and lighted warmly. “Where’s the tape recorder?”

She smiled. “Come on. Don’t you find me an eminently trustworthy person?”

“Eminently? No.”

She looked at her watch.

“Are you due there?” he asked.

“In a little bit. I don’t need to rush, if you have anything else you want to tell me.”

“I didn’t want to tell you this.”

“It’s my charm, I guess. It gets them every time.”

“Your persistence anyway.”

“Hey, c’mon. Give me charm. Make me feel good.”

“Charming persistence. How’s that?”

“I’ll take it,” she said.

“Do
you
like Lily?” he asked, abruptly.

“Oh, I love her. But she’s a great subject. And she’s not my mother, praise the Lord.”

“And what constitutes a great subject?”

“Well, it can be different things. But with Lily, it’s partly her egocentrism, certainly. She’s damned well interested in herself, so she’s ready, you know. She does
half
the work for me. She knows what she wants me to write. Sometimes a modest genius, let’s say, is the worst. Then you really have to work. Lily lays it out: ‘Here it is, my
life, ain’t it grand?’ and that makes my life easy. But . . . ” She shrugged. “It’s also the stuff she’s laid out before, for everyone else. So I’d like to
try for more. I’d like to know some deep, dark secrets.”

“Well. I haven’t got any.”

“Oh no, you do. You’ve told me some. In a way I can’t quite articulate yet. And I won’t, I
really
do promise, use them directly.”

“Why is it that every time you say that, I get more nervous?”

Linnett was pulling herself up now, onto her crutches. She looked over at him. “You’re cute when you’re nervous,” she said.

He turned away quickly, and she could feel herself blush. A mistake.

The hall was newly dark to her light-struck eyes when Alan opened the door and let her out. She touched her shoulder to the wall and moved slowly. “Please don’t watch me do
this,” she said. The light shone from behind him in his pale, curly hair. She couldn’t read his shadowed face. “It’s
about
as graceless as you can get.”

“I’ll try to have a working bulb in next time you come,” he said.

She turned to look at him again. “Great. I’ll see you, then.” She lifted her hand, and he stepped back in and shut the door.

She inched to the top of the stairs, feeling her way with her crutches, listening for Alan’s retreating footsteps in his office.

Next time
, she was thinking, as she lowered herself to the top step.

When Lily was in her early forties, her father, Henry, had taken several years to die, from something no one then would have known to call Alzheimer’s disease. Violet
spoke of it as his being “addled.” “Your father seems more and more a little bit addled,” she’d written to Lily. “I think he has too much leisure and not enough
to fill it with.” Lily had gone up to Minnesota four or five times during those years and stayed for a week or two at a stretch, usually taking Alan, or Alan and Clary, with her. Her function
was more to provide her mother with companionship than to help. There was, after all, ample paid help.

The last summer of her father’s life, she went up in June, taking all three children, and stayed until just after his death, in mid-August. At this time Henry didn’t even recognize
Violet anymore. He had forgotten what food was, and had to be forced, occasionally, to eat a bite or two. (It was this that he would die of actually, that old Fletcherizer. When he stopped
breathing, he’d taken no food for three weeks, no water for four days.)

Henry’s bedroom had been moved downstairs long since. He was allowed to wander the first floor, but the outside doors were all kept locked. The nurse, an enormous, meaty woman named Mrs.
Engel, dressed him tidily every morning. By nine-thirty or ten, though, he was usually already a shambles, draped in dirty towels or tablecloths he found in the laundry room, or having torn his
shirt, or simply taken off pieces of his clothing. For the most part, his activities were harmless and self-contained, but occasionally he had what Violet called a “wild day,” when he
struggled to escape, when he struck out, when he rained obscenities on her or Mrs. Engel, or cowered in fear in the back hall, or simply screamed and screamed. Then Mrs. Engel, whose instructions
from Violet were to let him alone as long as he was peaceful, would descend on him with her heavy tread and whisk him off to his bedroom. There she would give him what she called “a little
something to help him sleep.”

Henry, who’d been stout all his adult life, was tiny and wizened now, his skull sharply visible, his face shuttered blank, his mouth an open, empty hole in which his restless tongue danced
wildly. The children hated him, and Lily found herself, out of a perverse loyalty—for she had never loved her father, either—trying to explain to them what he’d been like in her
youth, who the person had been who was Henry.

To no avail. They shrank from him, as from a sick and therefore disgusting animal. Once, when he was having a bad day and Mrs. Engel had been summoned, Rebecca stood halfway up the front hall
stairs—where she’d fled from him—and shrieked, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe I’m going to have to spend all summer locked up in this smelly old
house with this
cretin
, just because he’s your father.”

Behind her, Lily could hear Violet’s sharp intake of breath. As soon as Mrs. Engel arrived and led Henry away, Violet moved past Lily and slowly climbed the stairs. Lily stood in the front
hall and watched her mother’s effortful ascent, a painful imitation of Rebecca, who’d turned after she shrilled her hateful words and run upstairs. Now Lily could hear Violet’s
door shut too. She followed Mrs. Engel and held her father while the sweating, heavy woman prepared the syringe and plunged it into his spindly arm.

Then she came out into the front hall again and stood for a long time trying to decide what to do. Alan and Clary were in the living room listening to a record of her parents’ that Clary
played over and over that summer, about the Stellenboschen boys: she was memorizing the lyrics, and Alan was caught up with her in her project, as he so often was. “Stop your
mooooaning,” they sang with the hearty men’s chorus. “Stop your grooooaning, the Stellenboschen boys aaaare here.”

Lily mounted the stairs in rhythm with the music and crossed the wide upstairs hall. She knocked on Violet’s closed door. After a moment, her mother called softly, “Come in,”
and Lily entered.

Violet was still a pretty, plump woman at seventy-four. Now she was sitting at her dressing table. Clearly she’d been repairing the damage that her tears had done. Her rouge was too dark,
and Lily’s heart wrenched at the sight of this fat, elderly clown, trying to behave with so much dignity.

“I’m so sorry about what Rebecca said, Mother,” Lily offered. “She was just frightened, really.”

Violet looked at her with watery eyes. “But to call him a
cretin
, Lily!”