by Bill Clegg
Once it was clear Leah was in Hap’s life for good, Gene toned down his bluster in her presence. Over time, she felt more comfortable around him, but was always cautious. He is yours and so he is also mine, whether I like it or not, but let’s not pretend to have the same experience of him, she told Hap later, after they became engaged. He was grateful for her acceptance of his old friend, but by then, the combination of Gene’s unabashed materialism and increasing dependence on alcohol made him less knowable, a friend in name and habit more than someone who could be counted on. Their infrequent calls and meals were occasions he no longer looked forward to, but tolerated. Gene was, as he had always been, his best friend, a status that seemed as fixed and infinite as family; but when they happened to be in each other’s cities, or on holidays when they were both home in Bethlehem, their interactions started to feel less like old times and more like a hollow ritual of the friendship Hap had taken for granted all his life. At some point after college ended, but before that first evening meal with Leah, Gene had become something else for him; no longer playing any of the important roles he’d played since they were boys—trusted ally, fierce rival, finisher of sentences, co-creator of secret languages, relentless corruptor, conscience, confessor, penitent, defender, witness, brother. It meant that what played out when they got together was a thin pantomime of their old closeness, like a Revolutionary War re-enactment, with all the gestures and costumes and language of the era; theatrical time travel that lasted long enough to remember the sequence of events, the heroes and villains, the glories and losses, performed with faithful detail each time to make sure nothing was forgotten, or lost, but bearing only a surface resemblance to what it mimicked.
When he made plans with Gene, Hap instantly began to wrestle with whether he should come up with an excuse to cancel, and sometimes he did, which left him feeling guilty. But mostly he would show up to the Eagles game, or the steak house near Gene’s office in Midtown, or the burger joint and bar at the bottom of the hill where they grew up and their mothers still lived. He’d go and he’d bear the obsessive talk of real estate, the impatience with waiters, the exaggerated stories of sexual conquest in unlikely places, and at some point swear to himself this was the last time. But inevitably some old story would crop up—the time they borrowed Mo’s car when they were fourteen and drove it to a parking lot outside of town and couldn’t find their way back; or the time they saw a woman get shot outside the Wawa in Easton after a soccer game. Gene was always better with the details—the silver Chevette that peeled away after the gunshots were fired, the pink v-neck sweater Mo was wearing when he and Hap’s mother came to pick them up and how they couldn’t stop giggling as she lectured them. Without these nights, Hap wondered where these details would go, whether or not the memories they belonged to would even last. After the boozy goodbyes, he was, more often than not, always glad he hadn’t canceled, relieved to remember why someone he had nothing in common with anymore, whom he often didn’t even like, still mattered so much. Gene was no longer an easy joy so much as a reminder of when he was one, which made their infrequent reunions as much a grounding as a grief.
Gene lives only a few blocks west of Christopher’s apartment, but Hap has not considered calling him. There was too much to explain and he could already hear his old friend interrupting him, bullying the half-facts to ugly conclusions, reacting with energy that was not helpful. Even Gene would probably insist that he immediately return to Bethlehem to be with his wife and newborn daughter.
But Hap could not go back. He felt as if he’d been living in an elaborately painted mural that he’d taken for granted was the real world, and then his father fell down a flight of stairs and ripped it wide enough to see that in fact what was real had all along been on the other side. Having only caught a glimpse, he couldn’t go home and be a father, or a husband, before knowing more. It would take a long time to gain Leah’s forgiveness, but he could make it up to her. And to his daughter. But he couldn’t make it up to Mo; nor could he make it up to the man who’d lived in this small apartment with little more than a good chair, a bed that folded into the wall, and a brown briefcase in the middle of the floor that looked like it had been left behind by someone who’d intended to bring it along, but had changed his mind at the last minute.
Alice
Hap’s daughter is asleep with the bottle still in her mouth. Alice tugs the nipple away, gently, fearful the baby will register the absence and begin screaming. The door rattles open downstairs. At last, Leah. She starts to call out, to let her know they are upstairs, but stops before waking the baby. She can’t believe she came so close to making such a stupid mistake after waiting all day for this rare quiet. She thinks she hears footsteps and as she listens for Leah, she remembers how Mo would come home from the bakery, take off his shoes, and in socked feet creep silently up the stairs to scare the daylights out of her as she got out of the shower, or sneak up behind her while she graded papers at her desk in their bedroom. She hated it and she loved it and when she was alone at home she’d often mistake the everyday creaking sounds of the old house shifting and settling for Mo’s stealth attacks. For all her vigilance, he surprised her almost every time. It made sense. There was nothing expected about him. He was an anomaly, a fluke of elements colliding at the only moment they could to create the man she had loved.
* * *
In the spring of 1978, it fell to Alice to organize the retirement party for the chair of the history department at Lehigh, a somewhat paranoid hypochondriac who was allergic to, among other things, all dairy products. From one of the mothers at Hap’s school, she’d heard about a man named Mo who made vegan desserts. A few weeks later, she met him at the bakery where he worked to go over the order. She’d brought Hap, who right away wanted every cupcake and cake in the display case. Mo was clearly Middle Eastern, probably not Israeli, she thought, with a name like Mo which she assumed was short for Mohammad. He appeared to be only a little older than most of the graduate students at Lehigh, and his clothing was cut to his body in a way that made his fitness apparent. A little vain, she thought, as she watched him ask Hap what he’d like to try. Hap asked for everything and Mo, exceedingly patient, fed him two then three cupcakes, which he took no more than a bite or two of and then enthusiastically requested another. Mo didn’t seem to mind, and because Hap was being so polite with him, saying thank you each time he was handed a new treat—not his usual approach, even with strangers bearing pastries—she let him have bite after bite. You’re a good sport, she’d said before they left, to which he responded by saying something that for days she wondered was flirtatious, maybe even suggestive. I’ll bet you are, too.
Mo delivered the cake to the party himself. She’d called that morning to let him know that she could send a student to pick it up, but he insisted on driving it over. All afternoon, she found herself checking the parking lot through her office window, and was tickled to recognize him when he got out of the orange Saab hatchback and pulled the cake box from the back seat. He was in sweatpants, a singlet, and running shoes, and he seemed to bounce as he crossed from the parking lot to the sidewalk. Happy guy, she thought. As he came closer to the entrance, she could see with more detail his exposed shoulders, athletic arms, and tightly curled black chest hair poking above his shirt-line. She clapped her hands together and said, Well ok! By the time he got to her office door, she was smiling to herself because she could not remember having a silly crush on anyone since Christopher. Her life was work and Hap and sometimes family and she did not pine to have a boyfriend or husband the way many of the women she knew did. She did not want marriage, or company, even. What she occasionally thought about was sex. Not with anyone specific, just the act itself which she’d had very little of in her life. The one extended relationship she’d had, with Christopher, was exhilarating and intimate but it was not particularly sexual. She’d had nothing to compare it to at the time, so the long build-up to intercourse seemed perfectly normal. After three months had p
assed and they finally went through with it, Alice expected from then on that all sex happened quickly, in the dark, under the covers, and ended when the man climaxed, not the woman. She and Christopher shared many nights in bed together, but only had sex five or six times. As she didn’t have any close friends her age to talk to about these things, she believed for a long time that what she and Christopher had was normal. Since then, she’d learned more and occasionally wished that she could just dial the phone and have sex delivered like she did pizza. But it didn’t work like that, and a few awkward one-night stands with other history professors at out-of-town academic conferences were, for Alice, the closest she was able to get to the tidy efficiency of ordering sex when she wanted it.
One of the faculty secretaries escorted Mo, cake box in hand, into her office. Where would you like this?, he asked, his eyes catching the gentle mischief on Alice’s face.
Oh, right here is fine, she said extending her hands and scanning his for a wedding ring, something she’d neglected to do when they’d first met. She didn’t hide her excitement when she found only long unadorned fingers curled at the bottom of the pink box with the cake inside. Yes!, she blurted as if she’d found a long-lost and beloved book, one that she’d given up hope of ever finding. Alice took the cake.
Two years later, after she’d sorted out the divorce papers with Christopher, Alice gave Mo a simple gold band and they had a ceremony between them at home, followed by a small vanilla wedding cake with lemon frosting that he’d made. I’m with you, she said, and neither of them needed any papers to prove it.
When Mo entered their lives, Hap was eight years old and unwelcoming. No cupcake in the world could bribe him, nor could any effort on either Alice’s or Mo’s part coax him from his wary distance. Their response was to let him come around on his own time. To Mo’s credit, he never crowded Hap nor tried to assert a paternal role. By high school, the two of them got along fine but Hap wasn’t as loving as Alice would have liked. If Mo had minded she might have pushed harder with Hap, but since he was polite and good-tempered for the most part, and his disinterest in Mo never reached a boiling point that required action, she decided to let things be. Even in junior high, Hap had his own life. He and Gene and the boys from the neighborhood left early and came home late and no one ended up in jail or hurt beyond a chipped tooth or smashed elbow. He got into college in Ohio and off he went. She didn’t believe her role as a mother had a finish line—after all, here she was rocking his infant in her lap—but once he finished graduate school at Penn and started his career in newspapers, she began to relax. He’d survived his boyhood and young manhood and made his way to adulthood without calamity. At its root, this was the goal all along. To keep him safe and guide him into the world until he could take care of himself.
In her first weeks with Hap, Alice wondered if the connection she felt would sustain. If by not having carried him in her body, she would be missing some elemental bond needed to weather all the frustrating and despairing times ahead. Many nights, she stayed awake in their house and feared she would fail this boy who had dropped into her care from the sky. But as he grew from colicky baby to rambunctious toddler to chatty kid something like awe replaced those fears and instead of worrying about the years that lay ahead she began to wish them to stall. As Hap grew up, her appreciation for the miracle of his coming into her life became more acute. It was her greatest privilege to witness his very particular soul arrive in this world, watch his character and personality shape over years into the man he was now. He had been a kind and earnest child, an entitled boy unaware of his privilege; he was forgetful and selfish and not the least bit materialistic. He was a good, if imperfect, man and he was as unfettered and unharmed as she could have hoped.
For Hap, Christopher hung the moon. That he saw him only once or twice a year seemed only to magnify his allure. It did not bother Mo who surpassed Alice in hours logged at soccer and baseball games, ferrying Hap to and from friends’ houses, shopping malls, and movies. He cooked every meal. Alice oversaw homework and bill paying and did all the laundry and housecleaning. It was nearly an even division of labor but Mo covered the day-to-day tasks like a parent even if he was never once called Dad.
Because it made the lie of his origins feel less pronounced, Alice insisted early on that Hap call her by her first name. His first word was Mama, which felt partly but not enough true, so she steered him away, and malleable toddler that he was, his second word was Alice. Even after Mo moved in, it was Alice and Alice only whom he came to for permission, approval, his plans, news of his first crush, his grievances at school. He behaved as if he lived with one parent who had a live-in boyfriend and it never changed. And Mo, perhaps because he was the only one besides Christopher, Lupita, and Dana who knew the truth, never complained. He’d roll his eyes occasionally or throw his hands up as Hap disregarded something he was saying or forgot to thank him as he rushed from the table after devouring a meal he’d spent an evening cooking. But he did not appear to suffer or chafe when Hap returned from his rare dinners with Christopher gushing with fantastic stories his father had told him.
Early on, Alice worried Mo would exact a tax for all that he tolerated. And in his way, he did. Not that it was overt, or ever so much so that she felt the need to discuss it with him, but there was a quiet, feather-gentle toll for his martyrdom. A stoic silence that figured into a million small decisions where his preference was given an unspoken priority over hers. Watching 60 Minutes together instead of listening to the radio and reading, putting bags of lemon ginger tea in the teapot instead of chamomile, renting apartments on their short and infrequent vacations to Montreal and Washington, DC, instead of staying in hotels—these were small concessions she gradually came to accept as part of the unspoken contract between them. For his part, with Hap, Mo stayed present but never in charge. He told Alice once that because he was no hero to her son he could never let him down, which freed him to get on with what needed to be done without the pressure of disappointment. Christopher, that’s another story, was the closest he ever came to criticizing the arrangement.
Christopher and Alice spoke on the phone before he’d visit with Hap. She never asked about his romantic life and she knew she’d hear his far-flung war stories secondhand in the car rides home after his meals with Hap, so she asked very little about his work. But they were always and only ever affectionate with each other and though they’d agreed to keep a distance between them, she felt love for him and would always be grateful he stepped up the one time she’d asked for his help. He never offered more, nor did she want more, but he gave Hap a sense of being connected to something special, in his boyhood especially, a fairy dust magic that got sprinkled once a year. Whatever complications loomed in the future, at the time they had seemed worth it. It was a strange configuration, but one that became comfortable. As long as a song lasts, Mo would quote from one of the poets he read. He meant there would one day be a reckoning, an unavoidable ending to the way things were.
She wonders where Hap is now, how much he has discovered. Oh my boy, she whispers to her sleeping granddaughter, imagining his agony. She wonders if he will ever forgive her. It’s true, she’d lied to him his whole life. It seemed so harmless when he was an infant. But as the years of sustaining the charade piled up, decade into decade, and everyone got old, she watched how complicated and evolving Hap’s relationships to Mo and Christopher became, how tortured he was. But there was nothing to do. It had been set in motion a lifetime ago and as Mo counseled many times, her job was to show up each day for her son, as she had, with love and intelligence and compassion. The outcome would be what it was and fretting about it or trying to manage it in advance would only succeed at undermining the present. Just enjoy him, Alice. That’s all there is to do.
The smallest hand bats Alice’s wrist. And dark blue eyes, open and alert, stare up into her face and hold her gaze. There will be so many faces, Alice thinks, and remembers the ones who mattered to her, the few who matter
now, this one the newest of them all. So many faces to see and love and kiss and question. The weight of the girl’s future life feels heavy in her arms. She whispers words she whispered to Hap when he was an infant, to herself as much as to him. They soothed her then as they do now, It will all be ok, little one, it will all be ok.
The only two checks she’d written from Lee’s checkbook were both to the bank. The first was to pay off her parents’ mortgages before they died. She told them that she’d saved the money and that it was a thank you for everything they’d given her. They did not argue, nor did they ever mention it again. The second check was to buy the bakery Mo had been working for. Shortly after he’d moved in with Alice and Hap, the brothers he worked for went bankrupt. The bakery was the only building they owned and it was being foreclosed on by the bank to pay off their debts, so Alice bought it and with Mo’s savings he revamped the kitchen and expanded the business to include deliveries to restaurants and coffee shops in eastern Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.
Valley Sweets thrived until the morning Mo died, twelve years later, as he was crossing the parking lot behind the bakery. An employee found him and called 911 but he was dead before the ambulance arrived. It was an aneurysm, the nurse at the hospital told her as if the information might make what happened less dreadful, nothing preventable.
