Chapter 1.6
Not knowing what else to do, Max went across the street. Josh was watching a football game with Tom who was reading and stealing a glance at the game from time to time.
“Hey Max, what’s the matter?” said Tom.
“Are you OK?” said Josh.
“I don’t know. Mom is acting weird,” said Max. Tom tore his eyes away from the TV, and turned it off in spite of Josh’s displeasure so they could give Max their full attention.
“What kind of weird?” asked Tom.
“All I did was tell her about the hockey game, and that you were chaperoning it, and that you wanted her to come, and she went off on me,” said Max, waving his hands about as he spoke. “About you couldn’t make plans for her, and she wasn’t your wife, and I don’t remember what else. Oh yeah, she said that I wasn’t supposed to push this relationship on her.”
“Uh oh,” said Tom.
“Did you guys have a fight?” Josh asked.
“Not that I know of,” said Tom. “I wonder what I did wrong.”
“She doesn’t like you anymore,” said Max. “She acted like I was in trouble for even talking about you. Maybe you should go over and try to talk to her.”
“I like Aunt Elaine a lot,” said Josh. “I want her to be my stepmother. You’ve got to do something Dad.”
“Yeah, and I wanted a stepfather too,” said Max. “Please do something, Tom.”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Tom. “Let me think about it for a minute, will ya?”
“I think I know what the problem might be,” said Max. He plopped onto the arm of the couch.
“What?” said Tom, cupping his head with his hand.
“Maybe she doesn’t feel right about you, because of Aunt Bonnie. You know. Loyalty to her friend.”
“Jeez, Max, you’re starting to sound like the way Dad is now, analyzing people all the time. Did she tell you that?” said Josh.
“No. I’m just guessing,” said Max.
“You don’t know your butt from a baboon,” said Josh, pointing at Max’s rear end. “Aunt E isn’t like that.”
“How do you know? She’s my mother.”
“Boys!” said Tom. “Let’s take it down a notch. I can’t think.”
After a pause, Tom said, “Ok, Max. Let me ask you something. You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to. I’m not trying to spy on her. How was she when I wasn’t around? Was she anxious to go out the next time, or acting like it was a chore, or what?”
“Um, I’d say that she acted like she was afraid to get her hopes up, but she was willing to give it a try.”
“That’s about what I thought too,” said Tom. “Good observation.”
“Lordy,” said Josh. “Either she likes you or she doesn’t.”
Tom ignored him and said, “You know there’s something I read that seems obvious, but most of us don’t want to believe it. The other person almost always tells you straight off why this relationship isn’t going to work, and you always think you can get around it. They are usually right.”
“And she told you something like that?” said Max.
“Yeah, and I didn’t think it was that important. It probably was.”
“Well, what was it?” said Max.
“I don’t think I should tell you. It’s your Mom’s personal business,” said Tom.
“So are you just going to give up?” said Josh. “What about not being a quitter?”
“I don’t know what I am going to do,” said Tom. “You guys are crowding me. I need some time to think.”
“Dad, just go over there and talk to her. Apologize for anything that she yells at you about, and you’re done,” insisted Josh.
Max said, “Maybe Mom is used to being independent and doesn’t want a husband telling her what to do? Is that it? Am I warm?”
“No, that’s not it,” Tom said.
“She doesn’t think you would treat me well? I can convince her that I like having you for an almost father.”
“No, that’s not it either,” said Tom. “She likes that for you too.”
“Well…,” Max struggled to find another guess. “It can’t be somebody else, ‘cause I would know.” To his surprise, Max saw a flicker of something in Tom’s eyes that said he was getting warmer.
“She hasn’t ever been on a date, except you, as far as I can remember,” said Max. “I kind of thought it was illegal for mothers or something, until I got older.”
“I know,” said Tom.
“She had you,” said Josh. “She must have had a boyfriend at least once.”
Tom shot Josh a dirty look. “That’s none of your business, Josh,” he said.
Max could feel the uneasiness in Tom. He realized that Tom knew something, and slowly said, “Oh. I get it. Whoever my father was hurt her so bad that she was afraid to ever try again. I’ve got it, don’t I?”
He didn’t need Tom to say anything. He knew he would be able to see the answer in Tom’s face. The possibility of getting a bit of information about his father was making him nervous, but also excited. He cared much more than his mother imagined but he carefully made sure she was not aware of it. He always feared that there was something terrible about his father that he was better off not knowing, but he also had a blank page in his story about himself that he would not be able to leave blank forever. He wanted to know, but he didn’t want to know until he was sure he was ready to hear any possible answer.
Tom’s face revealed that Tom did know something about Max’s father, but that Max’s guess about how he was affecting Tom and Elaine’s relationship was wrong.
Before Tom could decide what to say, Josh blurted out, “No, you dumbass. Your Mom is still in love with some jerk that dumped her years ago. See? And you think you know everything.”
Tom yelled at Josh, “Josh. That was not for you to say. How did you know that anyway?”
“Eavesdropping, Pop. One of my favorite hobbies. I don’t see why everybody has to be so secretive.”
“If I catch you eavesdropping again, I will beat you,” Tom snapped and then suddenly stopped and looked around. “Where’d Max go?” he asked.
“To go talk to his mother, I guess. I still don’t see what the big deal is.”
After Max left, Elaine got out a Christmas card and began to write a reply to David Wells.
Dear Dave,
Thank you for your apology. I have been waiting fifteen years for that. It means a lot to me. Our Son’s name is Maximillian David Webster, and he is in ninth grade. He likes baseball, wrestling, and he is a very good student, as you might expect, given his genes. I have never told him anything about his father. He assumes, naturally enough, I suppose, that he was the result of a one-night stand or something similar. He doesn’t ask, and I don’t tell. I would very much like to have your permission to tell him the truth.
Then Elaine tried to decide whether to tell him anything about herself, such as that she was still single. But then he would guess that she’d been waiting for him all these years, which would make her look like a real loser. Maybe she could just say that she was well. She made herself a cup of coffee and paced around the house thinking.
She was staring out of the dining room window when Max burst back into the house. She remembered that she had left the letters lying on her bed. She would have to make sure to intercept him if headed for that part of the house. But she was unprepared for what happened next.
Max came up to her at the window, put his face almost nose to nose with hers and said, “Who is my father?”
“What?” She felt like a cornered animal. Why now? Did he see something in the bedroom before?
“Tom said that the reason you don’t want him is that you’re still in love with my father. Why didn’t you ever tell me?” He didn’t want to get Josh in trouble, so he blamed Tom. He figured that the budding romance was history anyway.
“How
dare he?! Who does he think he is, interfering in my private family business? It’s not his place!” she cried out, not really to Max. More to the gods.
“Don’t blame him,” Max said. “We were all having a conference about trying to get you two together, because I was worried. I forced him to tell me why it wasn’t working.”
“A kid can’t force him to do anything. He should keep his mouth shut.”
“Whatever. So who is he?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t. Didn’t Tom tell you that too? I didn’t tell him who he was either.”
“No. All he said was that you were still in love with my father. You never in my whole life said anything about him. I thought it was something you wanted to forget. A terrible mistake when you were young. Maybe you don’t know who he was, ‘cause some guy took advantage when you were drinking. I could’ve been the result of a rape for all I know.”
“I know. I let you think that.”
“That was wrong. You should’ve told me the truth. You could’ve at least told me that you loved him. That would’ve meant something.”
“I’m sorry, Max. I really am. I didn’t want to upset you.” She was very uncomfortable having this conversation nose to nose in the middle of the dining room. “Can we at least go sit in the living room?” she said.
“So tell me now. I want to know,” Max said, ignoring her request. She walked toward the living room anyway.
“I told you. I can’t,” she said over her shoulder. Max followed her.
“There has to be something you can tell me. Like, I don’t know. Tell me what he does for a living. Or if he looks like me. Something.”
“Yes, he looks like you. And his profession is the problem. There. How’s that?” Elaine sat in her favorite chair and Max sat on the couch.
“Wow. There’s someone out there who looks like me. That’s a new idea. I have to get used to that,” said Max, feeling a new connection, but then his mind immediately switched to the other question. “What do you mean his profession is the problem? That doesn’t make any sense,” he said in an accusatory tone.
Elaine did not answer.
Max paced and then said, “Wait. Let’s play warm or cold, OK? His profession is the problem means that he does something that you couldn’t handle. Like he’s a cop or a soldier and you were afraid he’d get killed.”
“Cold,” said Elaine. “I can’t tell you much, but that’s cold.”
“He’s does something illegal, and you couldn’t make him stop it.”
“Very cold,” said Elaine.
“Oh, I get it. He’s married to somebody else, and his career would be ruined if anyone found out he had another child.”
“That’s a little bit warmer.”
“Mom. You slept with someone who was married to somebody else?”
She wasn’t going to say more, but she couldn’t stand the disappointment in his eyes. She shook her head.
“No. He wasn’t married to someone else.”
“What? That doesn’t make sense. Oh, but his career would still be ruined, somehow? That’s the warm part?” Max leaned so far forward he almost slipped off the couch.
“Yes.” Elaine sighed deeply. She always knew that she was going to have to tell him something, someday and it was becoming clear that today was going to be the day.
“Is he a priest?”
She laughed. “No, but that’s a creative guess.”
“I’ll get it eventually,” he said. “If I do, will you tell me I was right?”
“I’ll tell you what happened but not his name. I signed a legal contract promising not to tell you his name before you were even born.”
Max’s eyes got wide. “OK,” he said.
She walked over to the couch and stroked his hair for a minute. “Can I get you a drink?” she said, only half joking. “I think you’re going to need one.”
“No,” he said. “Come on, Mom. Please?”
“All right. He’s a famous politician.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Perfectly serious.” She waited for Max to assimilate this piece of information before she went on.
“Damn,” he said. She didn’t comment on his language. He was entitled.
He was quiet for a minute and then he said, wonderstruck, “Then I really am somebody.”
He paused again and then said, “Aren’t I?”
“You were always somebody, no matter how you got here,” she said. “But his influence doesn’t do you much good when he won’t admit you are his. He has been sending a lot of money to help support you all these years. I have to be honest about that”
“So that’s the big question. Why won’t he admit I am his?”
“Yes. That’s the big question. How much do you know about Grandmom Sue?”
“Grandmom Sue? She started losing her memory when I was only about six or seven. I know she was a doctor, before she retired. She was never married either was she?”
“No. She was from a certain generation of women that were militant about the women’s revolution. You don’t know anything about what the world was like before women were allowed to have the same educational opportunities and jobs that men could have. Basically men always had all the money, so we had to listen to them, unless we were rich, or maybe if we had exceptionally nice men. But see, Grandmom Sue was one of the crusaders, setting women free.”
“It sounds like Islamic countries, or like many centuries ago.”
“It wasn’t that long ago. Grandmom was in college. It had to be made illegal to discriminate against women at work and in business. Mostly it was a matter of convincing people that women were not dumber than men. Even a lot of the women believed that since they’d been hearing it all their lives.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Right. Which shows that we won the war.”
“What does this have to do with my father?”
“I’m getting to that. Women have always submitted to the rule of men because they could find themselves pregnant and with little children to care for at the most inconvenient times. If they could have babies only when they chose to, they could live their lives any way they wanted.”
“Did you have me on purpose?”
She laughed. “No. But I kept you. It’s one of the great ironies of life that people often end up doing things exactly the opposite of their parents. I’m just explaining Grandmom’s philosophy.”
“Which somehow seems to have something to do with my father,” Max prompted her.
“All right. I’ve been procrastinating long enough.” Truthfully, Elaine was only talking until Max had calmed down, before she told him the rest. She took a deep breath.
“Your grandmother performed abortions, among other things. She thought it was a holy mission for women’s rights. When your father found out, he dumped me, and you, because it would be a political disaster to have an abortionist for a mother-in-law.”
“And now he’s a famous politician,” Max said. His eyes were flashing with anger. “Because he got rid of us, because of something Grandmom did.”
“Yes.” Elaine felt a strange sense of relief hearing those words come out of someone else’s mouth, expressing the same feelings that had been bottled up inside of her for more than a decade.
“Bastard. Dirty Rotten Bastard. I hate him,” said Max.
“I don’t blame you,” said Elaine. She felt as though she might begin to float and quickly tried to suppress the feeling. This was not a good time to lose her mind.
“It’s not your fault, or my fault, what my grandmother did. Why do I have to be punished for it?”
“I know. I don’t think punishing us is his issue. His own career is the issue,” said Elaine. The floating feeling was gone.
“Then he’s just selfish,” said Max.
“Yeah,” she
said. “One hundred percent selfish.”
“We should tell the press what he did to us, and he wouldn’t be a famous politician for long.”
“We can’t Max. He was much smarter than me, even then. I signed a contract that I would never tell you or anyone else his name. It’s done now. I made a promise. I wish I hadn’t, but I did.”
Max rolled off the couch and lay on his back and started kicking at the rocking chair, making it rock, like he used to do when he was small. “Why does it feel like this?” he asked. “I always thought I would find out that he was a loser; someone that I was embarrassed to be related to, and glad I didn’t have to deal with. I feel even worse now that I know he knew exactly what he was doing. He’s more evil than anything I imagined. I feel terrible.”
Elaine got down on the floor beside him, “I’m sorry, honey. If it’s any comfort, he didn’t ever know you. It wasn’t personal.”
“Some comfort. I have half his genes. If that’s not personal I’d like to know what is.”
“I guess you’ll get used to it.”
“Yeah, right,” said Max.
“My father was a sperm bank. I got used to it,” said Elaine.
After Max went to bed that night she looked for a long time at the Christmas card. It was one thing for her to hope for some sort of reconciliation with Dave, but how could she love a man who had hurt her Max so badly? She hadn’t completely seen it from Max’s point of view before. She tore up Dave’s card and her reply and burned the pieces. Then she avoided Tom and Josh until she and Max left for Florida, because she really needed some time to herself.
After the New Year, Elaine shocked Tom by calling and asking him out to dinner. Josh teased him about grinning and dancing around the house, in Josh’s words, “like a crazy chimpanzee,” until Friday night. Tom got a haircut and a new sweater and told Josh on several occasions to shut up.
Tom pulled out a chair for Elaine in the upscale Italian restaurant in a remodeled old mansion and then sat across from her, and smiled. She was nicely tanned from her trip and seemed relaxed and at ease. He resisted the temptation to make small talk and waited to see how she would open the conversation.
“I am still mad at you,” she said. “But I’d like to talk it out. I had a nice trip and that helped me to calm down.”
Surprised, Tom said, “I’m glad you enjoyed your trip. What are you still mad at me about?”
“Are you trying to tell me you don’t know what you did?”
“Really. I don’t know.”
“Telling Max that I was still in love with his father. You have no idea what a chain of reactions that set off.”
“I didn’t tell him that. Josh did. I was being very careful,” said Tom.
“What were you being very careful about? And how would Josh know?”
“I was being very careful because the boys were both clamoring, because Max said you didn’t like me anymore, and they were meddling.”
“Oh. This isn’t easy, is it? Trying to have a relationship with two little meddlers.”
Tom grinned widely. She understood that it was because she said they were having a relationship. They stopped talking to read their menus and then give the waiter their orders.
“Did you tell Josh?” said Elaine, when the salads arrived. She took a bite and watched his face.
“Tell Josh that you’re still in love with Max’s father?” said Tom, picking bits of blue cheese out of his salad. “No. It’s your personal business. He was eavesdropping that first time I came over to your house. Probably he opened the bathroom window.”
She laughed. “Well, of course he was.” Then she sighed deeply at the difficulty of maintaining any privacy with the boys around all the time. She shook it off and polished off the rest of her salad. “That was really good,” she said.
Tom pushed his away. He couldn’t get all the blue cheese taste out of it. “So what happened? The chain of reactions that I set off?” he said with real concern.
“If we are going to have any hope, I’m going to have to tell you the truth. I have to say it’s not easy for me. I’ve gotten way too used to keeping my own counsel over the years.”
“Yes, I can believe that,” said Tom.
“OK. The reason that Max thought I didn’t like you anymore was because I got a letter from Mr. X, and that put me into a state. Max doesn’t know that part of the story.”
“I’ll be damned. Well, what did Mr. X have to say?”
“He wanted me to send him a picture of Max, and tell him how he’s doing, and he said he was sorry. He even said that he didn’t know if we had a girl or a boy.”
Tom cringed at the ‘we had’ instead of ‘I had.’
The entrees arrived and Elaine tasted her fish before she said, “Then when Max came back from your house that night, he demanded that I tell him something about his father. I was mad because I didn’t like being cornered, but I’m over that now. I had to do it sometime, and I’m glad it’s over with.”
Tom stopped eagerly eating his lasagna and said, “Are you going to tell me whatever you told him?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s why we’re here. Given how the boys are, you’d find out anyway, and I’d rather tell you myself.”
Tom wondered for a minute if he’d ever catch up to Elaine when it came to thinking about things like that in advance. Trying to impress her was the main reason he’d read all those books and was trying so hard to be more of a Mr. Sensitive.
“OK,” he said. He could tell she’d been rehearsing this conversation, and that his job was mostly just to listen.
She told him everything that she’d told Max, and waited to see his reaction.
“A famous politician?” he said. “Are we talking, like, famous in these parts, like a mayor, or what?”
“No, we’re talking about the national news on television. Not quite a household name yet, but he’s on his way. You’ve probably seen him at least once.”
Tom collapsed inside himself. Elaine was so far out of his league it wasn’t funny. No wonder he couldn’t get anywhere with her. Suddenly he couldn’t wait to get out of the restaurant, before he made an even bigger ass of himself.
He pushed back his chair, and began to get up. “Thank you for telling me,” he said. “I’ve got somewhere I need to go.”
“Tom, sit down. What’s the matter?” she said.
“I’m just me,” he said. “I’ve really got to go now.” He brushed against a waitress on his way to the door, and turned to put an arm out to keep her from tripping, and then he was gone.
Elaine calmly ate the rest of her meal, to all appearances, although on the inside her heart was beating much faster than usual. While she was eating, she thought long and hard about the men, two now, who had unceremoniously dumped her because of her mother. She was tainted goods. That’s all there was to it. She was done with men forever. She thought she’d already decided that fifteen years ago, and she was furious with Tom for seducing her into doing it all over again. Screw him, and all his kind. Except for Max of course. She paid for both of them, went home, told Max she had a headache, and went straight to bed.