The Love Children (15 page)

When I didn't hear from Steve before I left, I calmed myself down by telling myself I'd be home at Thanksgiving and would see him then. Of course, by the time Thanksgiving came around, I was deeply immersed in my new life with new friends and didn't even miss my home. I was enthralled with my roommates, and I met a girl I'd befriended when I worked at the café near Dad's. Gail had transferred to Andrews for her sophomore year, and we stumbled into each other on campus. She'd taken a year off to go to Baja, California to get to know her father. She was brought up by her grandmother in Queens, New York. Her mother was a private detective; her parents were divorced. Her dad lived in Baja with his second wife. She was crazy about him and stayed out there for a whole year. She loved it there; she swam every day and got really tan. She said she was a pro at indolence, but that there was really nothing for her in Baja and in the end she had to come back. Her mother wanted her to finish college. Her dad didn't care, she said: he was a happy guy who drank a lot and sat in the sun and played a banjo, living on his dividends.

Hearing this inspired me to call Dad, and he drove up to fetch me one weekend. He drove me back to the cabin, which had become a house since I had last seen it, with a real kitchen and a bathroom—with a toilet! I couldn't help saying that if he'd been willing to put it in a little sooner, he might have kept Mom. I said this even though I didn't think it was true; I think Mom had about had it when they split up. He snapped at me not to be a smart-ass, but I didn't care. In the car as he was driving me back to Montpelier, it came to me that I wasn't afraid of him anymore. I didn't know why I'd been afraid. He yelled, but he never hit me or anything. Still, I was glad to feel easier with him.

What I'd realized was that Dad had three personalities. The first was the man who had Dad's usual demeanor, the one he used with people outside the family—a really nice guy, amiable and sweet, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. You had to
love him; he turned everything into a joke. From things she'd said, I'd gathered he was the one Mom married.

The second didn't appear right away, although soon enough, Mom said. That one was explosive, with a red face, eyes popping out of his head, and a booming voice so loud it hurt your ears. This guy could not hear over the sound of his own yelling, and he made himself madder and madder in tantrums that went on for a whole day, or a weekend sometimes.

The third was a zombie. Dad became this when he felt defeated. He would walk around looking numb and not speaking, not present in his body. He could stay that way for a whole weekend, although often enough zombiedom led to explosion. He'd been a zombie the summer I lived with him in Vermont. I thought maybe that was why he got married again. It must have felt awful to be a zombie.

In whatever persona he was in, though, he was deaf. He couldn't take anything in from the outside. When he was in the first, you could talk to him and think he was hearing you, but he really wasn't. He was locked in and all he could do was repeat himself, shifting from gear to gear, grinding them sometimes. I kept thinking there was a “real Daddy,” a person who loved Mom and me, who thought about us, but I never did find him. There was a person who claimed to love us and cried when he talked about it, but I think he was always crying for himself. Mom said once he probably really needed to cry for himself, but never knew he was doing it. She said something terrible had happened to him when he was a boy—his parents abandoned him when his sister died, and he never got over it.

I was thinking about all this, lying in bed one night at Andrews, and I decided it was silly to feel hurt when he got angry with me or called me names because it wasn't intentional. He wasn't seeing me; he was seeing some figment that looked like me. I wasn't real to him anymore—if I ever had been. Maybe no
one was. Maybe real people merged with—who knows who?—his parents, maybe, his dead sister, kids he knew when he was young, people he'd read about in books or comics or seen in movies. As though he made everybody up. So when he yelled it was just because an object—me—was in his way. He was a tornado, beyond his own control, and whatever was in his path got blown to smithereens.

The first persona had probably asked Julie to marry him, but when I visited them, he had shifted into the third. I didn't know if Julie had met the second yet. She was nice but a lightweight and she would probably freak out if the second came up to her out of the darkness. You could see her trying to adjust to third when she kept expecting first, but because she didn't understand what he was doing, she didn't know what she was doing either. She always tried to be agreeable.

I liked Julie because she didn't try to be a mother to me. She tried to be my girlfriend: she was young and pretty and bubbly and she painted china. Dad looked at her—when he did look at her—with a kind of amused patience, very different from the way he was with Mom, all intense and raging. He added a room on the back of the house to give Julie a studio, with big windows and electric heat. She spent her days there painting flowers and birds on cups and saucers and plates. They were pretty, her dishes; she sold them through a local cheese shop, not enough to support her, though. It gave her something to do.

She asked me to choose colors and fabrics to decorate my room; she was eager to have the whole house finished, everything with dried flowers and pink bows and Laura Ashley fabrics and painted china everywhere you looked. I was shocked that Dad could stand to live in this environment and once I saw the rest of the house, I didn't want my room done. I was afraid she'd turn it into another one of the cutesy magazine rooms that inspired her, like the picture of a kitchen that she'd put up on her bulletin
board. So I got stubborn and said I wanted my room painted white and left alone. I had a brown-and-orange Navaho rug and an antique lamp with an orange globe on my desk and that was that. Julie was really frustrated, but Dad was amused and commanded her to leave me alone. I was pleased that he defended me, but sorry to see her hurt reaction.

Dad worked in his studio during the day, so the only time I saw him that weekend was at meals. We did talk at dinner. Friday night Julie broiled chicken until it was truly dead and baked potatoes and made frozen peas. Dad gulped it in huge mouthfuls. After Mom's cooking, you'd think he'd know it was bad, but he didn't seem to. He asked me what I was going to major in, and when I said literature, he made a face. I said I wanted to be a poet, and he said I couldn't be serious. And I said, “As serious as you were about being an artist.”

“How are you going to live?” he asked.

“How did you?” I retorted.

He made a face. “Stop being a smart-ass. You know you can't count on a man supporting you anymore,” he boomed.

“Like you supported Mom?” I said, wincing inside.

“Yeah. She got the car and I got the car payments,” he snarled. He looked absolutely disgusted and plunged into his drink as if my nastiness had driven him to it.

Saturday night he took us to a local restaurant, where he ordered a large steak, a baked potato with sour cream, and a lot of whiskey. He often looked flushed these days, and I wondered if that was healthy. That night he asked me about Andrews. I was careful in my answers. I felt guilty for being snarky the night before, and had vowed to try to be nicer. Of course, I never knew what would set him off, but I tried to soft-pedal the more liberal aspects of the place. I talked about its arts programs, the great writers on its faculty, the beauty of the campus. I figured he would like my being in Vermont. I tried to bring up as many
names as possible because I knew that the one thing that would make him like Andrews was hearing the name of someone he knew on its faculty, but no name I mentioned seemed familiar to him. It seemed I just generally annoyed him, and he lost himself in his drinks the same as he had the night before.

It didn't matter about my room, because I didn't go back to that house very often. Julie did eventually turn it into a dollhouse room. Well, why not? It was her house. I felt like a stranger there. I could only skirt my father's life: he did almost no talking. He stayed in zombie gear most of the time he lived with Julie; if he erupted into his second persona, I didn't see it. But maybe he did, because Julie left him a few years later. Until then, when you went there, you were really visiting Julie—who wasn't all that interesting.

He loved me; I kept reminding myself of that. But his mind was elsewhere. It wasn't with Julie or Mom or me. Maybe it was with his painting. Maybe he saw colors. Or maybe he was thinking about smoking and drinking. What he felt for me was something he'd buried deep in his heart, years ago. Every time I thought about him, my heart broke again. What broke my heart wasn't anything he was doing to me, or even anything he was doing to himself; it was just what he was. I don't know how to explain this, even now; I didn't know then, and couldn't have spoken about it to anyone, not even Sandy, not even Mom. I felt as though he was a walking ruin of something that wanted to be, that started out to be fine and noble and good. But he collapsed, imploded.

Still, it was on that visit that I got my first insight into his painting. I went into his studio one morning before he'd staggered out there with his mug of coffee, and I walked around and looked at all the paintings in different stages of completion and a few that were finished and leaned, drying, against the wall. They were big paintings, at that time almost all cerise and gray, with purple or black streaks and sometimes a yellow patch.

And suddenly I was overwhelmed by them. I felt them rushing at me, like nature overflowing, like rage pouring out of my father. They expressed uncontainable, animal energy. I began to see why people said he was great; and it came to me that maybe he was and that maybe it was worth it to him to pay for it with his life.

It would not be worth it to me. Did that mean I would never be a poet?

 

Sandy, Bishop, and I had exchanged a round of letters before the first intimations of disaster began to ripple, right around Thanksgiving, when I was home for the holidays. At first, the story had no connection with anyone I knew: several weeks earlier a Cambridge cop had been charged with taking bribes. A man who had just been promoted to captain of the police force was ordered to investigate long-standing rumors of police involvement in a drug ring in the city. An ambitious idealist, he followed his orders scrupulously and so became the first cop to look into the drug rumors seriously. His efforts gained him an ally, a political columnist for a Boston paper. The columnist had a team of informants, and he publicized the campaign. At Thanksgiving, he hinted that upper-level Cambridge cops were involved. I wasn't very interested in local news. I read this article only because Mom had called it to my attention, knowing that Bishop's father was police commissioner. When I went back to Andrews, I asked Mom to follow the story and send me clippings if anything more happened.

In the next weeks, she sent me a few clippings. To save himself, a cop who had been accused agreed to inform on a ring of other officers taking bribes from drug dealers. Actually, if you thought about it, it was obvious that this was happening. Otherwise, why would it be so easy to get drugs in Cambridge? Or any place? There had to be whole systems of people passing them on, each stop skimming a little from the pot, and the police
had to be agreeing not to notice. At Monaghan's, where Steve worked, you could get weed, mushrooms, amphetamines, anything at all.

When I came home again a few days before Christmas, Mom met me at the bus station and told me that the columnist was hinting that the commissioner of police was implicated—Bishop's father! The papers were full of talk about the ring of cops and rumors of higher-ups involved.

For dinner that night, Mom and I made a navarin. We stood in the kitchen together peeling tiny white onions and thin green beans. As it simmered, I called Bishop. He answered the phone, the same vague, dreamy Bishop, and I realized I didn't know what to say. I was home, I said, and how was he, and had he seen Sandy, and how was Yale and had he seen Steve and would he like to get together. I didn't mention his father. He said everything was okay, yeah, he just hadn't had time to write, he was so busy. Yale was great, he hadn't seen Sandy, he hadn't seen Steve either, he didn't know if Steve was going to Harvard or not, he never went into Monaghan's. Sure, we should get together, but he had promised his mother he'd drive her around this week to do her Christmas chores—getting the tree, ordering food, buying presents. He'd call me when he had some free time.

I put the phone down with a bad feeling. Bishop had always had time for me.

Always.

I called Sandy.

No, she hadn't called Bishop, she was too nervous, didn't want to upset him, didn't know what the situation was. Sure, she could have lunch with me tomorrow, she had loads to tell me, Smith was great! Really great! She loved it, loved her roommate!

We met at Bailey's, our usual place, and giggled and told truths through a three-hour lunch of a cheese sandwich and three cups of coffee. Our poor roommates' every secret lay revealed before
we were through. Neither of us knew anything new about Bishop or his family.

Bishop's father was arrested in March, so Sandy and I weren't around to give Bishop attention. Our mothers kept us informed, and we both called him, first at Yale, and then at home. He wasn't at Yale, and nobody answered the phone at the Cambridge house. The newspapers were full of Commissioner Connolly, who was accused of receiving payoffs over many years. He said he was innocent, but the headlines screamed corruption and there were photographs of him showing up at court with a fake smile on his face, and his lawyer beside him and little Mrs. Connolly clutching his arm, smiling also, right on the front page of all the Boston newspapers. I called on and off all week, hard as it was to call long distance from the dorm (the phone was on the wall of the common room on the first floor), calling Sandy in between. She was having no luck either. By early June, there was a weird machine hooked up to the Connolly's phone, some new invention, a machine answering the telephone! I didn't recognize the voice on the machine; I think it must have been Bishop's brother-in-law, Francis, saying the Connollys were unavailable but to please leave a message and they would return your call and to wait until the signal to start talking. The first time we heard this, we both just hung up in shock, but after that we spoke into the mechanical device. Bishop never called us back, so finally Sandy and I each wrote Bishop a letter and sent it to the Cambridge house.