Richie felt that he could go either way, depending on the girl. He was a little lonely, so he could imagine himself making something permanent, living in Brooklyn, an upper-floor apartment where the plumbing worked and the cockroaches were more reticent. He could imagine himself talking to this girl and making jokes, and going out to breakfast and seeing movies and taking the subway to work every morning. And not introducing her to Michael. On the other hand, there was nothing wrong with the system they’d come up with, and they could have dated every night if they felt like it. There were that many girls.
New Hope was about an hour and fifteen minutes away. The town was full of restaurants and shops, and all the houses were fixed up, with paint jobs and gardens. Michael said this was mostly because the queers decided they needed a nicer spot than Woodstock, and a closer one, too. This was how New York worked—money went to the Hamptons, hippies and Jews went to the Catskills, queers went to New Hope and Fire Island. In the back seat, Michael was making out with Marnie. They were laughing, and she said, “I should have worn jeans! Keep your hand in your own pants, Michael!”
“You know you don’t mean that.”
“I do. Shit!” She sounded actually annoyed.
Richie tapped the brake pedal, and the car lurched. There was a moment of silence. When he looked in the rearview mirror, Richie saw Michael hoist himself upright. A moment later, he put on his seat belt (Richie could hear the click), and then Marnie put on hers. He and Ivy exchanged a glance and a smile. Ivy’s lips formed the words “Mission accomplished,” and the two of them laughed, but softly.
Inside the Prelude, the sight of men with their arms around one another, dancing together and sometimes kissing, sort of shocked him, and when he looked again, there was the even odder sight of very, very tall women with narrow hips in high heels and heavy makeup who he realized after a few minutes were men in drag. Twice, they had seen shows of dance numbers on the stage. The dancers were beautiful and skilled, and when they bowed at the end, they pulled off their wigs and revealed their bristly heads. They got rounds and rounds of applause. The flashing lights and the pounding music made these sights all the more strange; it took him maybe fifteen minutes every time he came to stop staring and start having fun. No matter how well dressed Marnie and Ivy were, he and Michael got the stares. Ivy started laughing as soon as they walked in the door—she loved the outfits the cross-dressers had on that she herself didn’t have the figure or the nerve to wear, and she loved the dedication with which some of these guys had taught themselves wonderful old Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly moves. She kept poking him and pointing. The music was disco, but the dancing, often, was American in Paris. She got so pleased that she kissed him, saying, “Oh, you are sweet, Richie.”
He danced and danced, making sure he partnered with both Ivy and Marnie, until he collapsed at a table and ordered a Heiny. Michael liked Stoli and grapefruit juice. He said it was nutritious.
At one-thirty, Richie was ready to go—after five Heinies, he was still okay to drive, but he didn’t want a sixth. Ivy was sleeping against his shoulder, and Marnie was dancing with a tall woman in heels who needed a shave. Right then, the Donna Summer song came on, “Last Dance.” He didn’t know where Michael was until he heard his voice. Three queers on the dance floor were having an argument Richie had heard before: “He’s mine, he’s going home with me,” followed by “No, Tommy, this is my new friend. I’m leaving with him.” Then another voice, saying, “You want to come with us?” Then the first voice, rising, “I brought you! You called me because your transmission is fucked! I paid the cover!” Then Michael’s voice, “Yeah!”
Richie eased Ivy’s head onto the table and stood up. He was a little off kilter. Michael’s voice shouted, “All right.” It was Michael’s I’m-about-to-punch-somebody voice. Richie made his way through the hugging bodies on the dance floor. They were in the back corner. Michael’s jacket was off, and his shirt was unbuttoned, but the three guys (all dressed as guys) were ignoring him. One was shaking his head regretfully, and another was putting his arm around the head shaker’s waist. The third was between Michael and his friends; just as he opened his mouth, Michael pushed him toward the other two and exclaimed, “Act like a fucking man, you faggot!” The guy fell forward, and the other two caught him. Michael ran at them and managed to grab one of them before Richie knocked into his twin and bumped him aside; then he closed his fingers around Michael’s upper arm and pushed him across the dance floor to where Marnie was petting Ivy’s hair. He said, “Let’s go to the diner. I need a cup of coffee before we head home.”
“Fuck you,” said Michael.
“Oh,” said Ivy. “Me, too. Me, too. Can we have a pancake?”
“Two pancakes,” said Richie. He helped Ivy to her feet and gave his hand to Marnie, who stood up, shook herself like a dog, and said, “Wow, did you see that guy I was dancing with? He was like Cyd Charisse or something. Taller, though.” She kept mumbling. Richie put an arm around each girl and steered them toward the door. As planned, Michael stumbled after them, muttering, “Fuck, fuck. Fuck.” He almost hit the pavement where the parking lot met Old York Road, but Richie stuck with the girls and put them both in front, only then opening the rear door and kind of pouring Michael into the back seat. Michael curled up and let out a moan. Marnie said, “He really is an alcoholic, you know.”
“I know,” said Richie. Marnie closed her eyes, but Ivy seemed revived. She took Richie’s hand and squeezed it.
At the New Hope Diner, Richie helped the girls up the steps, in the door, then to the second booth, Marnie to the left of him, Ivy to the right of him, himself squeezed cozily in between. Marnie was hungry now, too. The waitress kept yawning into her pad. By the time the food arrived, Michael had staggered in. Through the window, Richie could dimly see that he had left the car door open. Michael didn’t order anything—he ate half of Richie’s bun and one of Marnie’s slices of bacon. He drank a cup of coffee. He said, “You know what the fuck really pisses me off?”
“What, babe?” said Marnie.
“This faggot sits next to me at that bar there? And I say, Watch your fag, faggot, and he’s got this long ash on his cigarette, and he drops it right onto my pants.”
Richie laughed.
“Don’t laugh! There’s a big fucking hole.” He scooted out of the seat and stood up. Sure enough, on the front of the right leg of his pants was a blackened hole about a quarter-inch wide. The polyester fibers had burned and melted. “Hurt, too. I shoulda punched the guy out, but I thought I was gonna fall off my stool.” He coughed.
Both Ivy and Marnie rolled their eyes.
By the time they got back to Michael’s apartment, it was very late, but there was a parking spot in front of the entrance. Richie was fine—not drunk at all. With the girls’ help, he heaved Michael out of the car and through the door, into the elevator, up one floor. He was stiff—in its stupor, his body still possessed the tension of finely tuned anger and pride. Richie dropped on the couch, and Marnie took off his shoes. Ivy found a blanket and threw it over him.
When Michael was well and truly taken care of, Richie said, “Okay, sweeties, it’s after five. I’m tired. Want to take a nap?” He opened the door to Michael’s bedroom. The bed looked inviting—made, at least, no clothes strewn all over it. Marnie yawned, and Ivy said, “I want the left side. I just can only sleep on the left side.”
“I get the middle,” Richie said.
—
THE LAWYER, who worked from a walnut-paneled office in his very enormous Gothic pile of a house in North Usherton, was Frank’s long-ago chemistry lab partner. He’d always been nervous about what was smoking in the beakers but didn’t mind writing up the results. Frank shook his hand heartily, and listened to him yammer on about how proud everyone was of Frank, he’d really made something of himself, a life to be envied, not so narrow as that of a small-town lawyer, six kids, though, and all of them doing fine, the eldest boy down in South Florida now, first grandchil
d—he sighed, apparently in spite of himself. And this house, well, it took as much upkeep as any farm. A half-acre front yard—
Joe and Jesse came in—Joseph Walter Langdon; “Jesse,” not “Joe, junior.” The three of them sat at the table. Jesse gave him a grin, was glad to see him. Joe shook his hand without saying anything. Frank had done a good turn, and everyone was a little surprised at it, including Frank.
The lawyer came back in as they sat down, and spread the papers that they were to sign in front of them. Frank had been right, as usual. Lillian had willingly given her portion of the farm to Joe. Henry had said, “Tell me what a farm is again?” and laughed. He knew they would never sell the place anyway, so why think of it as money? Paul, of course, had nearly knocked Claire over in his rush to put his hands on the $260,000 Uncle Jens had paid for her share (after inheritance taxes). Gary and Aunt Angela had been plenty grateful in the end to take their money, too—Gary was planning on buying his own rig. Andy had made no objection; her Higher Power and her friends in AA thought it was the right thing to do, and besides, she was indifferent to money as long as her charge account at Bergdorf’s was free and clear. Frank smiled at Jesse and said, “Got your dollar?”
Jesse pulled a dollar out of his pocket, and Frank frowned, then said, “I’ve changed my mind. I think I’m going to charge you ten.”
Solemnly, Jesse said, “I have that. I was going to—”
But then they all laughed, and Frank shrugged, saying, “Go ahead, buy yourself some lunch.”
“I was going to buy gas.”
They all signed the deeds, and Frank received his one-dollar “consideration” and put it in his inside jacket pocket. He said, “Okay, I suppose I’ll invest this in computers.”
Everyone laughed again.
The lawyer swept up the papers and stacked them together. He congratulated Joe and Jesse, now joint owners of a very nice farm, and, as they all left the office, he put his finger on Frank’s arm. “I have to tell you, I’ve seen a lot of grief and fury in this office. Glad to see this one stay together and remain a family farm.”
Frank smacked him on the back in a friendly way, then followed his brother and nephew onto the porch and down the long driveway. They paused when they got to the street. It was late afternoon, but the air was still bright and flat with dust. Joe said, “Never thought that would be so easy. When John died, my heart sank, I gotta tell you.”
“Who’s going to live over in their house?” Only two houses now—the kit house where Joe and Lois lived with Minnie, and this old Vogel-Augsberger place.
“It’s in pretty good shape,” said Joe. “John told me it was built by a famous bricklayer who’d come over from Bavaria after learning his trade there. I guess he made the bricks himself.”
Frank said, “Remember the story Opa used to tell about the brick maker who refused to give the king an extra brick?”
Jesse said, “What was that?”
“Well, every time the brick maker took his bricks from the kiln, he set aside a certain number for the king, and at the end of the year, he pushed them in his wheelbarrow to the castle. They were fine bricks, of an unusual color, and after the king had received them for many years, he decided to build a house with them, with an arched doorway as an entrance. But after the house was built, the builder was one brick shy—the very brick he needed as the keystone of the arch. He wanted all the bricks to match, so he sent his representative to the brick maker to demand one last brick. However, since the brick maker had paid his taxes, he asked that the king pay him one aureus—that’s a gold coin—for the brick. The representative sent a messenger to the king, and when the king, who was walking around the new house, heard the message, he became enraged at the arrogance of the brick maker. He sent the messenger back to arrest the brick maker and throw him into the dungeon. He kept walking around and around the new house, and after a while he was so angry at the pride of this mere common brick maker that he decided that he wanted to go and demand the brick himself. And so the king rushed out of the house, and as he did so, his crown hit the top of the arch, and the arch, being unsecured, collapsed on top of him and killed him.”
“I don’t remember that story,” said Joe.
“Is there a moral?” said Jesse.
“Sometimes it’s easier to pay,” said Frank. “ ‘Do the easier thing’ was always Opa’s moral. He was a happy man.”
Frank did not want to be thanked. What he wanted was just this thing that he was now getting: Jesse laughing at his story, this knowledge that his money had gone for something worthwhile at last, that, against all odds, he was a good man, that happiness could be bought—if not his, then Jesse’s and, yes, Joe’s. Joe and Jesse got into the same car, Jesse driving, and waved as they drove off. Frank stood for another moment or two, not knowing quite where to go for the evening.
1977
AS OLD AS she was and as much as she had seen, Eloise understood politics less and less. How blithely she and Julius had once discussed whether, in America, class was the most important political divide, or race. Julius held out for class—he was a traditionalist, wasn’t he?—and Eloise insisted on race. But neither of them had any idea what they were talking about—they had learned it all from books. In 1920s Chicago, they had been know-it-all tourists, writing articles and tracts extrapolated from the theories of Germans living in England. How was she to think about the Zebra killings, converted Muslim black boys walking around San Francisco, torturing and shooting random white women and old men because they were white and white people were devils? She thought several things, and one of them was, why not, really, given the past and present cruelties that whites perpetrated on blacks? Another of them was, if women were equal to men, then why were their murders more affecting? And another of them was that religion was not just the opiate of the people but an out-and-out poison; and still another was, I hope I don’t get shot walking down Shattuck, thinking about whether I should wash the car. And what was she supposed to think about the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst?
Even more current and confusing was Janet and Lucas’s growing attachment to the Peoples Temple. Eloise liked all of these youngsters. Janet, child of the bourgeoisie; Lucas, child of the working class but with artistic aspirations; Cat, child of the lower middle class with hopes of self-betterment; Marla, a beauty, which was a class of its own no matter what Julius would have said. There was also Jorge, whose father had been a doctor in Mexico City, but who had died when Jorge was two, so Jorge had picked vegetables in the Salinas Valley with his cousins until some kind church group put him in school; it turned out he was good at science and math, and so now he was taking pre-med courses at SF State. Someone whom Eloise had only met once was Lena, a runaway from North Dakota, whom the others knew from the Temple. Maybe she was sixteen. She was, apparently, much appreciated for her blond good looks by Reverend Jones. She might be shaping into a full-fledged member of the Lumpenproletariat, but, then, militant feminism asked you to resist categorizing prostitutes as morally suspect merely because they worked in the sex trade. Truly, Eloise was beyond her depth politically, as she suspected Julius, and even Karl Marx, would have been. What she did was offer advice from time to time and hope for the best. What she also did was worry.
She worried because, one visit to the Temple and one look at “Reverend” Jones, and she knew what she was seeing—Joe Stalin from Indiana, the sort of fellow who sucked down a few ideas and then vomited them forth, now irreparably contaminated by the poisons of his very own body. And soul, for that matter, if you believed in souls, which, as a materialist, Eloise did not. It made no difference at all to her that Willie Brown had called the man “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao”—that was campaign bullshit. Or that this kid Jerry Brown sucked up to the fellow, too. Now that they were in office, she thought, they would be running from the Temple fast enough. Jones was crazy and getting crazier, and you didn’t have to be a former member of the
CPUSA to perceive that.
Saving Marla was easy: having put off her escape to Paris for a year, in hopes that her two new one-acts would be produced by the Berkeley Rep, Marla just needed a little push. Well, a medium-sized push. She had used most of her savings to produce the two plays at a coffeehouse in Berkeley—no reviews, small audiences, net loss of $487.32. Eloise had liked the plays, both set in a classroom. In the first play, Lucas walked around, drumming on a desk, dancing, drawing, searching here and there, evidently out of control. A teacher’s voiceover gave him increasingly impatient instructions, until, finally, he sat down at his desk and read, resentfully, from an old first-grade reader, with Dick, Jane, and Spot on the cover. But he gave up, slumped slowly to the floor of the stage, and lay there for a long moment as the lights got brighter and brighter. The play was only fifteen minutes long, but Lucas was convincing and affecting in his role. In the second, Marla played herself, as a six-year-old child. It took place in the same classroom, and a short woman, maybe five feet tall, played the teacher. But Marla was perfect as a six-year-old—lolling in her chair, asking in a loud voice to go to the bathroom, interrupting the (imaginary) recitations of the (imaginary) other children, making addition mistakes on the board, sitting on a stool in the corner with a dunce cap on her head. She was so beautiful and elegant as she went through this performance that you really were shocked when the teacher caned her. But apparently, no one in Berkeley was interested in the childhoods of black children as portrayed by a woman playwright. This season, the Rep was doing Shakespeare, Noël Coward, Our Town, yawn.