When she got to Iowa (she still would not go all the way to New York), she slept one twelve-hour night, and then she was up, her hair washed and combed, her bed made, her bag unpacked, and her clothes put away. Minnie was a week away from starting school, so she sat in the kitchen while Janet fixed herself a hard-boiled egg and a piece of toast, which she ate neatly. She washed up after herself, and then sat down across the table from Minnie. She looked haggard and grief-stricken, but she said, “I should do something.”
“Why don’t you take some courses?”
“Where?”
“ISU. Iowa. Drake.”
“I never applied to graduate school.”
“You can still take some courses. Night courses, if you want. Ames and Iowa City are pretty quiet, at least compared to—”
Janet smiled. “That would be a change.”
“Do you want to talk about—”
Janet shook her head, and Minnie wondered which thing she didn’t want to talk about—what happened after she got to San Francisco, or what drove her to San Francisco in the first place. But that was neither here nor there. Janet was sitting in front of her, as ready as anyone Minnie had ever seen to take advice. Minnie said, “I always say, choose the place, not the school. Then you’ll be happier.”
“I would choose Iowa City.”
“Me, too,” said Minnie.
So they did it step by step. The girl would not take a penny from Frank, referred to his wealth as “blood money,” but she was willing to take a loan from Minnie of $250.00. This was when she admitted to Minnie that she had given all her savings to the Peoples Temple at the last minute, after everyone she knew was gone, as a kind of desperate gesture. “How much did you have?” said Minnie.
“Eleven hundred dollars. I had a good job. I was making fifty bucks a night in tips.”
Minnie asked no more questions, just helped her find a small apartment on Gilbert Street, within walking distance of downtown, and a part-time job at Things, Things, and Things, which was an expensive but cheerful shop on Clinton. She helped her buy a bed and a chest and a lamp and some bedding and a chair. She went with her to the registrar’s office, and, yes, there were quite a few courses she could take. She chose an advanced French-conversation class and a class in art history. Minnie paid the fees, which were small, since she would only be getting adult-ed credit. Then she left her there, sitting on her bed, on a very warm, humid, sunny afternoon, with a sad look on her face, and as she drove back to Denby, Minnie wondered if she had diverted Janet to a less self-destructive path, or if she had just supplied her with the setting for more of the same.
1978
IT WAS NINE. Henry was dressed and had eaten a bowl of oatmeal. It had been snowing for fifty-three hours. Henry knew because he remembered getting up in the dark two nights ago to take a piss (from the Old French, pissier, twelfth century, origin unknown), looking out the window, thinking that it was snowing again—what was that, the tenth storm since Thanksgiving?—looking at the clock, and going back to sleep. With the howling winds and the sad attempts at plowing, some drifts mounted to second-story windows, covered cars, blocked streets. He had tenaciously kept shoveling and sweeping his little walk—if he hadn’t, he would not be able to get out the door. It was fortunate in some ways that he had sold his car and not purchased another: he would have hated to see a new car simply buried in snow for four months on end. And having no car meant that he wouldn’t set out hopefully for, say, Milwaukee, only to be stranded, trapped, and frozen to death. On the other hand, if you walked everywhere, as Henry did, being frozen to death or blown away in these winds was also a hazard.
Rosanna had sometimes talked about the storm of ’36 or some such year—Henry would have been three; he remembered nothing—when they first sent Frank to Eloise in Chicago because there was no school in Denby. Frank had supposedly gone through a tunnel of snow and nearly died, and two women saved him by buying him a berth in the sleeping car. Maybe, in those days, two women were always saving Frank. That same year, snow outside his future room, the addition where Joe was sleeping alone, had been up to the eaves. After this winter, Henry thought he could go toe to toe with Rosanna; he was in the most prepared-for-snow city in the world, and there was nowhere to put it. All they needed now, Henry thought, would be a nice ice storm to seal them in permanently.
In ordinary circumstances, no one would have said of him that he was a farm kid, not even his parents, but he had a farm kid’s plenitude of provisions—bags of flour, bags of rice, bags of dried beans, boxes of spaghetti, cans of tomatoes, a freezer full of chicken breasts and nicely trimmed steaks. He had wine, he had water, he had anchovies and several varieties of Italian cheeses; if he had to make himself pizza for a week, he could do it. He had a kerosene lamp; he had wood for the fireplace (he’d used about half of that, and he was careful to keep the flue clear—his colleague Nina had passed out several times, thinking that it was the dreary nature of her manuscript that was putting her to sleep, but it turned out to be her chimney leaking carbon monoxide into the living room).
He went into the front room and picked up The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppède: A Study in Text and Context, which had just arrived from Oxford for his review. Jean de La Ceppède was right up his alley now. In the summer, Henry had visited Aix-en-Provence and decided that medieval France was unbelievably alluring, and why had he not lifted his youthful gaze from Caedmon and Cynewulf and looked farther south, where the weather was better and the literature and history more complex?
But not only had Henry’s academic interests shifted toward France, he was also lonely, had been lonely since Philip left, now two years ago. Philip was in New York, and there was no reasonable hope of seeing him until spring break, seven weeks away. And even if he saw him, Philip had moved on. When Henry stayed with him for four days in October, they had gone out to the bathhouses every night, and while Philip ran joyously from room to room, partner to partner, disappearing and coming back, Henry sat at the bar, sipping gin and tonics, frightened, glad of his graying hair, his utterly straight outfits—khakis, sweaters, blue shirts. Though he had appreciated the wildness and color of the scene, though he had been flirted with, he would have grabbed the bar and resisted being taken away from it with all his strength. Philip, irritated and a little offended, had said, as if he meant it, that that emblematic medieval experience Henry had had as a boy, an eyeless white horse exploding in a ditch full of paleolithic refuse, was the key to his whole Weltanschauung: human nature is inherently evil and is never to be trusted. Philip was much more of a Romantic.
Once in a while, he wished he could call Rosanna and pick a fight with her, as he had done so many times in the past. “Ma,” she had hated that, but when he called her “Mom,” she said, “What are you, twelve years old?” When he called her “Mother,” she said, “I am not a nun,” and so for a few months he referred to her, only in her hearing, as “Mother Superior,” always smiling when she pursed her lips. Ma! Ma! What did you call a finicky maternal figure? She might have liked “Rosanna,” but none of them had dared. He’d wept when he saw her in the open casket, neatly dressed in her gray dress, with the pink sweater she had knitted herself and some black pumps. They had fixed her hair anyhow, not in the bun she preferred, and Lois had said, seriously, “Maybe we should fold up all the sweaters she made herself and put them in there. I hate to see them go to the Salvation Army.” But it had seemed too strange to do such a thing, and so they had gone to the Salvation Army—they were too small for anyone in the family.
After the funeral, he had come home to the very apartment where she had died, and not thought very often about it. In spite of having picked her up and lifted her and held her hand, he found himself sometimes dialing her number because he hadn’t heard from her in a while and felt guilty, and then he would remember. Was this failure to have experienced her death because, in spite of the evidence, he just couldn’t believe it, or because she had never accepted that he was gay (though he had nev
er told her, either, leaving that to Lillian or Claire, and it was unlikely that they ever had)? Maybe she knew what a homosexual was, if she dared to think about it, but sexuality of any kind was not something talked about. You wanted to know the facts of life, you went out and watched some sheep. Were there boys in the neighborhood who tried putting it to a sheep once in a while? My goodness, why are we talking about such a thing? Henry smiled, stopped reading. The windows were flakily white. In the distance, he heard a siren. It had a futile sound.
If he called Philip now, Philip would be short with him, or maybe brusque. Henry wondered if Basil, too, visited him, and made better use of his opportunities than Henry did. In England, it would not be snowing, or if it was it would be mounding silently on the Gothic windowsills of elegant cathedrals.
For fun, he had taken a test that sorted personality types, and he had given it, too—to Beowulf, to Sir Galahad, to Sir Lancelot and King Arthur. All of them—were they sick, sick, sick, or just a certain type? He had come up I N T J—introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging—no surprise, and he had no trouble finding synonyms—stuffed shirt, irrational, persnickety (which was a lovely example of onomatopoeia, a variation on “pernickety,” which was in turn a variation on the Scots word “pernicky,” origin unknown), snobbish—that he was sure his colleagues thought were equally applicable. But, he had to lament, irrational, persnickety, snobbish (sine nobilitate) stuffed shirts had needs and desires, too! It didn’t help that, over the years, he had suppressed his sense of humor. When the department had to designate someone to write a gassy, sober report for the administration, Henry was the one. As for being gay, well, he accepted Philip’s view that if you were gay you were gay, but he sometimes wondered, did careful come first or did homosexual come first? Those times he had been with women (and, in retrospect, perhaps he had not experienced Rosa as a woman, because of her confidence, the chip on her shoulder, the clothes, the flat chest, the air of sophistication), had been looking at marriage and children, it had seemed as though being gay would be permanent relief from chaos, and this had turned out to be true. Every romantic encounter nicely arranged and self-contained, like a meeting of spies on the street corner, so careful to avoid the notice of MI5 or the KGB—Henry had liked that part. Could you break out of the box of your I N T J, or were you stuck with it? Was it temperament or training, nature or nurture? Maybe it was a little late, at forty-five, to be asking this question. But if you spent forty-four years arranging things to your satisfaction (according to Rosanna, as soon as he could pick up a block, he made sure that it coordinated with the block next to it), then who was to tell you that satisfaction was maybe the deadliest feeling of all? He looked out the window and decided to call Rosa—but when he tried to get her number from Information, none could be found.
—
ANDY WAS in the bathroom, reading a copy of Vogue on the john. She didn’t know what she thought about the Madame Grès draped look. Maybe you would have to feel the fabric against your skin to really enjoy the dresses; otherwise, they were rather dull. The phone rang. She had had a phone installed in the bathroom so that she could soak in the tub and talk, but, like—who was that?—LBJ, she often quietly picked up when she was doing her business. Janet’s voice said, “Mom?”
Andy closed her magazine. She hadn’t heard from Janet in two months, since Christmas. She carefully said, “Hi, honey,” as if this call were no big deal.
“How are you?” said Janet.
“Fine.” Janet had told her four times since her escape from those people in San Francisco that she really did not care to be reminded of that crap (that crap that Eloise had detailed for Andy with indelible outrage), and so Andy did not dare say, “And how are you?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“I’m sure he’s at the office.”
“It’s after eight there.”
“Maybe he’s getting a bite to eat, then.”
There was a silence, during which Andy assumed Janet was choking back some sort of disapproval of their domestic arrangements. But after Nedra retired (and with a nice package, Andy had assured her AA group), no one was interested in cooking. Andy could make her own salad.
“What are Richie and Michael doing?”
“You know they had their twenty-fifth birthdays?”
“I sent them cards.”
“Did you? I hope they received them. Michael’s apartment is such a mess, no one in their right mind would go in there, and Richie seems to be staying most of the time with a girl he knows on the Upper East Side. She’s Jewish.”
“Mom!”
“What? She is. I met her parents. They’re Jewish, too.”
Andy could hear her report this remark to someone. She was getting to that stage that her father had gotten to, where everything he said got laughed at, but if that was the price of conversations with Janet, Andy was willing to pay it. She said, “Her uncle is a furrier. They gave me a hat. It looks good on me. Can you call me back, I have to—”
“Mom.”
Andy shifted her position and set the magazine on the floor. She knew she was about to receive some news, felt a moment of dread, but then she sensed what the news would be. As Janet said it, she mouthed the words, “I’m pregnant.”
Andy forced herself not to exclaim, “Oh dear.”
Janet said, “He’s wonderful!”
“You know it’s a boy?”
“No, Mom. Jared. Jared Nelson, my beloved. The father of the pregnancy.” She laughed. There was a laugh in the background.
There were many questions that Andy did not dare ask: Are you married? Did you meet him in San Francisco? Where’s he from? What does he do? Is he divorced (not a bad thing, in Andy’s estimation)? Does he get along with his parents? What’s his birth order? Does he drink? Does he speak any Scandinavian language fluently (“Nelson” was possibly a bad sign, though “Nilsson” would be worse)? Janet forestalled her by saying, “He’s the funniest person I ever met.”
Andy smiled.
“Mom?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’re happy.”
“I’m happy that Jared is the funniest person you ever met.”
“Are you happy I’m pregnant?”
Andy let her gaze wander over the pink bathroom tiles, take in a tiny cobweb, then her shoes, which she had kicked off, then the tub and the sink. She shifted position again, and stood up. According to AA, you were not allowed to lie. When was it, sometime recently, she had seen a picture of a sculpture installation—Dad, Mom, six-year-old daughter, one-year-old baby son. All were the same height, six feet tall, but proportioned realistically. The result was that the baby was enormous, the hugest and most dominant member of the family, and the six-year-old came second. Andy thought it was the truest depiction of family life she had ever laid eyes on; all they needed for profounder horror was expanded premature twins. Even so, she said, “Sweetheart, I am happy for you. And I am happy it’s you and not me.” This was to be their future as mother and daughter, then—the past unmentioned, a fresh start, equals in keeping their feelings to themselves. Quite Nordic, in its way.
Janet turned away from the phone and repeated this. The voice in the background laughed, and then Janet laughed. Andy let out the breath she was holding. Janet turned back to the phone and said, “Oh, I love you, Mom.”
She hadn’t said that in twenty years. But as if this declaration were routine, Andy said, “Sweetie. I have to get off. But call me tomorrow and tell me more.”
Janet said she would.
When she walked into the kitchen half an hour later, Frank was leaning into the open refrigerator. She said, “There’s some ravioli from Antonio’s in that cardboard box. It was good.”
Frank stood up and turned around. Before he could tell her anything at all about work, she said, “Janet is pregnant.”
Frank slammed the door of the refrigerator and said, “I didn’t know there was a boyfriend.”
“Neither did
I.”
“Are they getting married?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
Frank swallowed, and then swallowed again. Eloise’s report had frightened him, too, though he had said only, “Doesn’t surprise me.” Andy walked over to him, put her arms around him, and laid her head on his chest. She could hear his heart beating—loud booms. She’d always wondered how his arteries could take such a powerful current. He remained stiff for a few moments, and then he yielded, put his arms around her. This was the way, so long ago, forty years now, she had first come to love him. You had to get inside his shell to feel sorry for him; if you didn’t feel sorry for him, then you couldn’t experience love, but if you pressed yourself against him and felt the warm tension of his flesh, you always felt sorry for him, and tender, too, as lonely as he was. He might hate that, but if you were brave, you would feel it anyway. She felt it now.
—
PAUL HAD INVESTED “their” money from the farm in something called a Money Market Fund, at almost 9 percent, first for six months, then for another six months. He had longed for the money and been happy to get it, but he was preoccupied by it—he made sure that Gray and Brad, thirteen and ten, knew the difference between a Certificate of Deposit and a Treasury Bill, but Claire did not know the difference, and didn’t care. All she knew was that her original $240,000 was bubbling up, and the effervescence amounted to about twenty thousand a year. Paul insisted that the wisest thing to do was to let the interest compound, and he taught the boys the Rule of Seventy-two. Even Brad now knew that if you left your money in the bank at 10 percent interest per year, and then divided seventy-two by ten, the resulting figure was how long it would take for your money to double. If you had, say, $240,000, he said to Brad, by the time you were eighteen you would have $480,000, and by the time you were twenty-four or twenty-five, you would have almost a million, but you couldn’t touch it. It had to stay in the bank. The great thing was geometric compounding—at thirty, you would have two million; at thirty-seven, four million; etc. Brad could figure it out from there. And Brad did—if retirement age was sixty-five, then at retirement you would have more than sixty-four million dollars!