The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  “The letter!” Naomi exclaims. “I forgot about the letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “You don’t remember the letter?” Kenny asks. I shrug, so he continues. “Dad had a letter. From President Kennedy. A letter of . . .”

  Naomi completes his sentence. “A Letter of Recognition of Service.”

  “That’s right,” Kenny continues. “From his time with the Rotary. Remember when he raised all that money for the hospital and they bought those things? You know, for ambulances.”

  Everyone looks at my mother for clarification. She speaks quietly, without looking up from her lap. “Portable defibrillators.”

  “That’s right. You know those things. Clear. Boom!” Kenny puffs his chest out in demonstration. “They’re standard now, but back then they were new. And as head of the Rotary Club, Dad raised the money to buy like three or four of those things and President Kennedy sent him a Letter of . . .”

  “Recognition of Service.” Naomi tosses a dinner roll at Kenny and it lands with a thud on his plate. She reaches for another before realizing that our mother is watching and drops it back in the basket. Conduct unbecoming of the neighboring town’s mayor.

  “Right. He was so proud of that thing. Showed it off to everyone. Twice if you were Irish. Or Catholic. If you were both you would never hear the end of it! Had the Seal of the President and everything. Embossed. Remember that, Naomi? Every time he would mention the Seal of the President you would clap your hands together like flippers and bark like a seal.”

  For added effect, Naomi does exactly that. “Does the sister still smoke pot in the book?”

  “Ugh. And the brother’s such a slob.” Kenny looks at me, dejected.

  “I’m thinking of running for the legislature. I really wish you would take that out. Oh, God, and now she’s read it? My political future is doomed.”

  “Relax. Even our president-elect has smoked pot,” Daniel says, coming to my defense.

  “Yeah, but he didn’t inhale!” Kenny bursts into laughter, and this time Naomi can’t stop herself from throwing another roll; it beans Kenny right in the head.

  “Stop throwing rolls before the kids see you!” Ellen covers the bread basket with her napkin.

  “Where is that letter? Dad’s letter.” Kenny looks at our mother, who freezes like a statue. Fortunately, Kenny breezes right past her. “So you see, you have to give us something more than just ‘nice.’”

  My mother rests her folded napkin swan on the table and its neck droops like it’s injured or diseased. She stands to clear the dishes.

  Naomi snaps her fingers. “Sit.”

  My mother glares at Naomi in a test of wills, then responds like an unwillingly obedient dog. Domino, however, full from table scraps and napping in the corner, stands up and yips.

  “Francis is telling a story,” Naomi says, as if that will soften the bark of her command. She looks at me, delighted with her recall of Francis. Once my mother settles back in her chair, Naomi instructs me to continue.

  I gulp the last of my wine and set the glass down on the table, and turn it in a circular motion three times. The sudden employment of a long-dormant name makes me feel like my mother’s protectorate again, like I want to stand up for her now. She shouldn’t have to hear any of this if she doesn’t want to. I look up, to Daniel first and then around the table, for backup. I find none. My eyes land last on my mother.

  “Yes, Francis,” she says through gritted teeth. “Continue.”

  I shove my hands into my pockets and take a deep breath. I squeeze the phone message from Mark in my right fist. You didn’t do it. I begin slowly, gathering the courage to power through. “In one of our first working sessions she made daiquiris.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” The whole room erupts.

  “Daiquiris?” Kenny asks.

  “Yes. But not the, you know, syrupy kind that you would get on one of those cruise ships Kathy Lee Gifford sings about. A simple version with rum and lime.”

  “She made them,” Naomi asks.

  “Yes. She had the rum in her office.”

  “She did not,” Naomi disagrees.

  “You’re pulling our leg!” Kenny protests.

  “I swear! It was a gift from another author.” Everyone looks to their neighbor to see if they believe me. “We work, mostly. But we talk about things too. Life and relationships and even politics, sometimes. We watched Bill Clinton accept the nomination together.”

  “At Madison Square Garden?” Kenny is impressed. “Did you have a private box?”

  “No, no, no. On TV at her house on Martha’s Vineyard.”

  Kenny slaps his forehead as if to say “of course,” while my mother looks absolutely indignant.

  “You talk about relationships? Like, her marriages?”

  “No, other relationships. Like she knows about Daniel.” Daniel leans back in his chair, impressed with himself, and makes a motion like he’s shining an apple on a nonexistent lapel. “Familial relationships. Fathers and mothers.” I pause, knowing I should stop, but more words drip off my tongue. “Mothers and sons.” I bite my lip and look over at my mother, who further seethes. “I would never push and ask her much that she isn’t willing to volunteer. It just seems impolitic. Disrespectful.”

  My mother finally looks up. “But she can ask you anything she wants. Even something disrespectful.”

  “Well, she’s never disrespectful, but . . . yeah. She holds more of the cards.” I try to uncrumple and refold the message in my pocket. I need to keep pushing. “Disrespectful to whom?”

  “So she’s like your boss,” Kenny says, cutting me off, still putting the puzzle together.

  “Well, no. Not really.”

  “You’re her boss?”

  “No, no. Of course not.” I look again at my mother, who is wondering why it is that I can’t disrespect a stranger but she has to endure being disrespected by her son. “Yes. Sort of. She’s sort of my boss. It has a similar dynamic.”

  “But James has the final say, creatively,” Daniel points out. “He can veto her edits.”

  I glower at Daniel—he’s not helping—but, still aglow with the idea of Jackie and me discussing him, he doesn’t notice. “Only to a point,” I respond. “I pick and choose. But I choose most of them! Most of them are spot-on.”

  “Huh.” Kenny huffs.

  “The publisher, and thus Jackie, has the final say. I mean, they could choose not to accept the manuscript when I’m finished. Refuse to publish it.” There are actually four empty bottles of wine on the table; I spot another empty over by Ellen, hidden behind the centerpiece. Four bottles between five people—that’s a lot, even for us.

  “Is that likely?” Naomi asks.

  “We’ll see. I turned in the latest draft right before coming here. She said she’d look at it over the holiday.” I cross my fingers and hold them up for all to see, knowing already my work is not done.

  “Wow. You must be on edge.”

  How much did I drink?

  “So she’s at home reading about us while we’re sitting here talking about her! What a weird world we live in,” Kenny remarks. I remember all the strange thoughts I too had to come to terms with after I first met Jackie and learned I would be working with her.

  “Well, not us. It’s a novel.”

  “Yeah, but come on. The sister was a pothead, the brother was kind of absent—which I guess I was, since I was trying to make partner at the time—and the mother started every day by blasting Handel’s Messiah.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I whisper, under Naomi’s continued protests about being stoned.

  Kenny starts singing. “And he shall reign forever and ever, king of kings and lord of lords. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hal-lay-ay-lu-jah!”

  I bow my head as if in prayer. Shouting and singing continues. I sneak a side
ways glance at my mother, who is rearranging the silverware on her plate in conspicuously complicated and noisy ways. She drops her knife between the tines of her fork and it lands with a clang. She repeats this action, and for a moment it is the only noise that pierces Kenny’s song. Even the children are silent in the other room, watching a videocassette copy of Frosty the Snowman. Then she slides three fingers into a wooden napkin ring and starts drumming with it on the table. Barely, over the racket, I hear Frosty exclaim “Happy Birthday” as he slides on the magic hat and comes to life just as Kenny comes to a close of another chorus. “Hal-lay-ayyyyyyyyyy-lu-jah!”

  “KENNY.” Ellen glares. “That’s enough.”

  The whole thing is so overwhelming, the sounds of my childhood coming from the other room remixed with Kenny singing and my mother’s angry wooden percussion. We are in the dining room of our old house, but everything seems suddenly strange and new. The antique clock that used to hang between the windows is on a different wall. The wallpaper is gone, in favor of mossy green paint. Kenny sits comfortably at the head of the table, as if he has always sat there, but he is a substitute patriarch failing to keep this family in line. As the rapping on the table falls into perfect synchronization with the pounding in my head, I’m finally able to refold the message from Mark in my pocket; in the chaos it feels like solving a Rubik’s Cube.

  Joe says you didn’t do it.

  I blurt out the one thing I know will force my mother to engage. “I wonder what Dad would think of all this.”

  My mother mumbles her response, swallowing the words almost as quickly as they come out of her mouth, and at first I’m the only one to hear them. Kenny and Naomi resume their argument over the whereabouts of the Kennedy letter and Daniel is ready to jump in with a question, probably about defibrillators (if I know him, and, for better or worse, I do), while Ellen has one ear cocked, listening for the kids to see if she needs to rewind Frosty and play the tape again. That leaves me as the sole witness to my mother’s appalling statement.

  “It’s probably in the box of his files I have at my house. I swear, one day I’m going to go through everyth—”

  Kenny stops mid-sentence when Naomi holds a finger up to pause him. As a mother herself, she’s always on high alert for trouble, and something immediately registers to her as not right. “Wait. What did she say?” she asks me. And then, since I am too dumbstruck to answer, she turns to our mother. “What did you just say?”

  “Yes, Mother.” I glare at her. “What did you say.”

  For the first time this visit, my mother truly meets my gaze, and we lock eyes in perhaps the most direct staring contest of our lives. She swallows and stutters and then stops before she even starts.

  “What. Did. You. Say.” I put my napkin on the table like I’m about to rise out of my chair.

  My mother clears her throat, shrinking under the weight of everyone’s eyes focused squarely on her. “I said, He wasn’t your father.”

  Only once before do I ever remember being on the receiving end of a look like this, and it was when I was maybe six or seven and we were in a store and I wanted something trivial (Silly Putty, perhaps, to reproduce the comics page), and she, defiant, stared at me until I hung it back on the rack. But this time she is willing me to speak, to do something in response. “You’re drunk,” I whisper.

  Daniel stops and looks at me with quizzical concern, but I don’t break my death stare. He turns to my mother and sees her glaring back at me; I’m not sure if he heard what she said. Either way, he knows something is wrong.

  Kenny stares at Naomi, and from the very edges of my periphery I can see Ellen turn to stare at Daniel; we now have a full Mexican stare-off.

  “Aileen, did you just say what I think you said?” Daniel finally manages.

  “What did she say?” Kenny thinks he’s missed some inconsequential bon mot, at most some insight into the whereabouts of the letter.

  “She said he wasn’t our father.” I make sure she’s still looking at me so she can see what those words look like on my face. “I said, ‘I wonder what Dad would think of all this,’ and she said he ‘wasn’t our father.’”

  “Whaaaaat?” Kenny starts to laugh, but without looking at him I can’t tell if it’s nervous laughter or because he knows it’s absurd.

  “No. I said he wasn’t your father.” She holds her stare just long enough to see the dagger go into my heart. I think I recognize a flash of horror across her face, but she looks away at the far wall too quickly before turning her attention to her lap.

  “Aileen,” Daniel starts.

  Naomi jumps in. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

  I can feel a hand reach around my heart and squeeze, and the result is not so much pain as it is fear. Because the next thing that happens is I can’t fill my lungs, I can’t force air into them, I can’t get them to expand. My weight grows in my chair, as if suddenly it were rooted to the floor of a house on another planet with a mass infinitely greater than earth’s, a planet where my weight would be double or triple what it is. Daniel places his hand on my shoulder without taking his eyes off the unfolding family drama; I resent the weight of it as if it’s further anchoring me down. My eyes grow wet, with sadness, with rage.

  Naomi is now picking up the empty wine bottles one by one and setting them back down. Kenny looks around the table like a pollster trying to judge the mood of the electorate.

  “Mom. Is that true?” he asks.

  My mother doesn’t speak, so I speak for her. “Is what true.” The words fall out of my mouth like marbles as I turn to my brother for help. Once in fourth grade, this kid Bruce Snyder—who must have stayed back at least three or four times, because I swear he could shave—threatened to beat the crap out of me after school for telling our teacher that he ate three of my pen caps. Kenny, who was in high school at the time, was waiting for me by the front doors of our school when the final bell rang and escorted me home for a week. I want that big brother now. I want that big brother again.

  But it is Ellen who comes to my defense. “James, don’t listen to her.” She’s rewarded with a stern look from her husband, as if she’s speaking out of turn.

  Kenny is not quite there at the school’s main entrance. He’s maybe a block away still when the bell rings. He’s not prepared to ask the question that demands an answer, so instead he asks, “Are you drunk?”

  My mother whispers, “No.”

  “Of course she’s drunk.” Naomi pushes an empty bottle of Cabernet away from her in disgust. It tips over in slow motion, and when it lands with a dull thud several drops of red wine hit the salt and pepper pilgrims like blood spatter, for once their permanent surprise faces warranted.

  My mother mouths the words I’m not.

  I wonder for a moment if I’m the only one who sees her do this, but Kenny roars, “Then why would you say such a thing?”

  We are frozen in diorama; someone could paint us and we would be exhibited in a museum and studied by future generations. Notice the pained expressions, the stillness of the composition. Everyone has eaten, and yet they are still hungry. Unsatisfied. Look how the figures are all in their own space, separate, even though they look as if they belong together; only the two young men are touching. Take in the heavy brushstrokes, the paint weighing the figures down.

  “WHY WOULD YOU SAY SUCH A THING!” Kenny slams his fist on the table and the tableau is broken. We all jump, as do the plates and the silver. Everything hangs frozen in midair, like we’ve hit zero gravity for a split second, and then comes crashing back down on the table.

  “I said it because it’s true.”

  ◆ NINETEEN ◆

  You’ve got to be kidding me,” my father gripes.

  “That’s the assignment.” The cake pans rattle as she sets them on the counter. My mother is losing her patience.

  “He might as well be a Girl Scout.”
>
  Three months into Webelos, our den mother announced our December activity would be a father-son cake bake. Based on their reactions, this seemed to many of my packmates at odds with the purpose of Webelos: to transition boys from Cub to Boy Scouts. Peter Headley even pulled out his manual as proof we should be learning about survival, wilderness, and first-aid skills—like we’d been doing. His father had given him a pocketknife, and he was anxious to use it. We had already sat through lessons on building a campfire, finding a good campsite, and identifying edible plants and berries. There was one activity about campsite cooking that involved placing some hamburger meat and a potato in individual tinfoil pouches that we each hand folded; we cooked them on a pile of charcoal briquettes and then ate them in Lance Falchuck’s backyard with plastic forks. But baking and cake decorating were not activities you could really do in the wilderness and seemed, to some of the other kids, outside of our stated mission. Which is, of course, why I’m excited.

  “Boys should be out collecting rocks, hiking, and staying physically fit. Or put to work picking up trash along Route 89 if they need a project.”

  My mother doesn’t respond—she’s used to letting my father talk himself out. I remain silent so as not to give away my position in the hallway around the corner.

  “Can’t you just do it?” he asks. My heart sinks. Once again, my father pawning me off on my mother.

  “What is wrong with you?” she whispers, so that I won’t hear. She knows I’m never far. But I always hear.

  “It’s demeaning. Pamela’s working out issues in her own marriage and taking it out on these boys.”

  “What issues would those be.”

  “She hates Barry. Probably all men.”

  “And so she’s punishing you with cake. How horrible.” My mother slams cabinet doors. I imagine she’s assembling ingredients—sugar, flour, baking soda, vanilla extract—for our confection. “If she’s so man-hating, why would she volunteer to be on the front lines raising the next generation of them?”

  “Maybe it’s part of a secret plan to topple us from within. Women like that? They’re not to be understood.”