Beneath the Weight of Sadness

by Gerald L. Dodge

“Yeah, okay, but on beer. Fuckin’ beer, Carly. It makes me charged. It makes me want you more.”

  I remember one time I was at a party and there were a lot of kids there—someone’s parents had gone away for the weekend and there were only supposed to be a few people getting together to drink some beer and shit. But word got around and by the time Tommy and I got there I think there were probably a hundred kids there, and there was a pool, and so people were swimming and grilling and I have to admit that it was a lot of fun. And of course Tommy and I were two of the kids who had been officially invited, because Tommy Beck was invited everywhere. That was another thing I liked about him. He was probably the most popular kid in school even though he was not the smartest or the funniest by a fucking long shot.

  Tommy can get pretty fucked up on beer, and I can always tell because his eyes get really red and the blue in them turns to a kind of gray and he doesn’t laugh so much. I mean at first he does. Busting with his friends and talking about how the Giants are the best team or the Yankees or whatever and how some people are assholes, but all in fun. Just really funny shit. But the thing about Tommy and drinking is that he downs beer like it’s water. I mean, he doesn’t sip it, he chugs it. And at some point this switch goes off in him, and it’s almost instantaneous. It’s like he’s laughing his ass off and then the next minute he’s all sullen and shit.

  I forgot what I was wearing that night, but Tommy is always telling me I’m the hottest girl at Persia High. You are fucking smoking, Carly! Believe me about that! And I will also admit right now that a lot of other boys at that school paid attention to me. I mean it wasn’t like they would come on to me or anything, exactly, but they would send out signals and I could feel them. They also knew I was hooked up with Tommy Beck and that I was verboten. One of the guys though, Steve Brown, who was this really cute guy, would talk to me a lot. We had study hall together and we sat across from each other and he was funny and smart. Even Truman liked him, I think.

  So he was at the party, and I think he was with this girl named Wendy and they’d hooked up a few times together, and at one point I was out beyond the pool area, because this kid’s parents had a really big house, and there were a few kids there with weed. So I went out near these bushes where it was dark, away from the lights, and eventually there were four of us, including Steve, smoking a blunt. I didn’t know where Tommy was, but I knew he’d been drinking a shit-load of beer and in all the commotion I’d seen him with Katie Barry, who he was always saying was so hot, and so I thought, fuck him.

  Steve started telling me this story and it had something to do with this shark he and his father had caught off the Margate Bay. When they got the thing on board it scared the shit out of both of them because it was so big, and they threw it back into the water. I don’t know if it was really that funny, but I was so stoned it seemed funny at the time.

  And it’s like when you have something happen and it’s not until much later you can piece the whole thing together because it happens so suddenly, like a bird streaking across your vision and it’s only afterward you realize it was a sparrow. That was the way it was with Tommy, because Steve was just taking a hit from this blunt and then it disappeared, the sparks going away from his face and being replaced by Tommy’s fist, and almost as instantly Steve’s nose moving as if it were part of a Halloween mask that you can disfigure for fun. Almost as instantly the blood began to gush from his mouth and nose and in slow motion he put his hand to his mouth the way people do when they have just seen a gruesome accident.

  Tommy hit him again, this time on the side of the head, and I could see his ear swell immediately like it’d been inflated with air, and almost as quickly Steve went down on all fours, and I saw Tommy kick him in the side.

  “You motherfucker! You’re trying to get into Carly’s pants, you motherfucker!”

  Tommy went to kick him again, but by this time I’d gotten between them and I began slapping him on his face and neck and shoulders. He didn’t seem to notice even though by then the two other people with us were pushing him back.

  Steve.

  He was still on all fours, and the blood was streaming onto the grass and Tommy was shouting, “Fuck you, you perverted fuck. You think you can get Carly high and then fuck her? Is that it, you perverted fuck?”

  More people had come out to see what was going on, and now a few guys were holding Tommy back. He tried to go after Steve again. I kept hitting at him, slapping at him, and then someone grabbed me, I don’t remember who it was, and pinned my arms to my sides.

  “You asshole!” I shouted. “You fucking asshole! What are you doing, you fucking asshole!?”

  “Carly,” he said, his words slurring and his face getting all remorseful.

  I pulled away from whoever was holding me, tearing my blouse in the process, and I went at Tommy again, slapping his face twice, hard, and he just stood there, a few guys still tugging at him and him not defending himself.

  Steve was still on the ground and some girl was bending over him and somehow she’d produced a towel or a rag and she handed it to him and he held it in front of his face.

  “My nose,” he said, the blood dripping into the towel. “Is it okay?”

  And then almost as an afterthought he said, “My nose.”

  I could see that his nose had been punched to one side and normally I would’ve been sick, but I guess there was so much adrenaline flowing through me I wasn’t affected by it. People were helping Steve up and leading him toward the house. I was being constrained by the same person again, and I looked at Tommy who was now standing there, breathing hard, watching Steve being half-carried, half-steadied away from us, and then Tommy looked at me with his look that meant, I love you, babe.

  And once again I wrenched myself free.

  “You fucking, fucking asshole!”

  I walked past him and toward the house and the lights, and I heard him say, “Carly,” softly, and then I heard him begin to cry.

  Amy

  Five days after Truman’s death

  Truman is in the ground. I keep telling myself that. My lovely Truman is in the ground. It rained the day they lowered the casket. I sat next to Ethan, the both of us watching as the rain fell on my son’s casket, the spattering of each of the drops like some cold needle in my heart.

  Truman used to kiss me on top of the head as if I were the child, as if I were the one who needed comfort and consoling. He began to do that when he turned ten. Hey, Mom, and then a kiss on the head. He could tell when I was upset with Ethan, even though I tried not to show it in front of him. Ethan working too much; Ethan joking around too much; Ethan not spending enough time with his son; Ethan in his mood.

  Ethan’s moods. Thank God Truman never, ever adopted that trait of Ethan’s, at least not at first. After fifteen years I no longer asked Ethan what was wrong. I no longer wondered if it was me or Truman or both of us. I would just allow him to be by himself.

  Please, Amy, just let me be by myself and then I’ll be okay. Sometimes it was three fucking days of being by myself.

  Truman would put his beautiful little hand on my cheek. Hey, Mom. Meaning: He’ll come around. He’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.

  Ethan’s silence was brutal. But I know and knew he couldn’t help it. The moment Truman was born I knew he was going to be sensitive, with his wisp of blonde and his black eyes.

  “He’s going to be you, Amy,” Ethan said when he first held him. “Thank God he’s going to be like you.”

  Because even back then, in 1993, Ethan was already beginning to shut the door, and I felt so lonely on the other side. Oh, he could be effusive, and if it hadn’t been for those times, that part of him, I would’ve left him long ago, as I am thinking of doing now.

  Yes, yes, Truman, my little boy, was going to be like me. He was going to bring us so much joy that Ethan would once again be the Ethan I fell in love with when I first met him in front of Dodge Hall at Columbia. He was wearing that tweed jacket (which I never allow
ed him to toss) with jeans and a white button-down shirt and Doc Martens and his clumsy, absolutely adorable feet, reading on that bench, and he looked up at me with those green eyes as if he’d been waiting for me. Verbose, I first thought, but in a way that mixed his wonderful, self-effacing sense of humor with a gift for understanding the most complex ideas. I was an English major and he was in law school.

  We began dating right away, which with Ethan meant going for coffee and talking for hours about our pasts. He talked a lot about his maternal grandfather. Truman Canton, a one-star general who’d had a huge effect on him. Eventually we started going to his dorm room to make love. I started calling him Ethe.

  He told me that his parents were both intellects and distant from him, as if they had a secret alliance that excluded him, and his brother and sister, too. But their expectations for their children were high and they could afford to have high expectations, because the Engroffs had plenty of money. They’d owned textile mills in northern Massachusetts and their investments had been wise. When I decided to marry Ethan Engroff, I didn’t know how much money he would inherit. I knew he’d be a good lawyer. I knew that because, when he was verbose, he was eloquent.

  But then a bottle of Dolce & Gabbana perfume changed the course of our future life. No more legalese for my Ethan. He’d bought the perfume for me on our very first Christmas together. The idea probably occurred to him when he was holding the elegant box. For certain it struck him by the time he had gift-wrapped the box himself.

  To his mind no self-respecting lover would give a gift wrapped by a stranger—too impersonal. I know he thought to himself (as he still does with regularity), Who boxed this perfume? Certainly not the perfume manufacturer. Who boxes all the things we buy: jewelry, toys, shoes, tea, cards, cereal…etc., etc. He did rigorous research, hours and hours and hours of research at Butler Library when he should’ve been studying for school. Because Ethan Engroff had already decided he would no longer invest his time in the study of law at Columbia University, but would manufacture high-quality specialty boxes for all the businesses that needed boxes.

  “I’ve done the research, Amy, and I cannot fail with this. Plus, if I do,” he said confidently, “I can always come back and take up where I left off”—and he put his finger up in the air to halt any protest I might have had, not that I did—“and even if we are married and Truman is already in the oven—” (Ethe had already decided our child would be a boy, and we would name him after the old one-star general himself, all of which was fine with me and really my idea)—“I still have a trust fund coming from the Engroff side that makes the Canton amount pale in comparison.”

  We were married that spring after our first Christmas together, after I graduated, and then we went to the Cape Cod house for two months. We could’ve gone anywhere, gone to Europe or Asia or the islands, but both of us wanted to go to the cape, and so for those two months the house was off limits for any of the Engroff family, including the one-star general. Six bedrooms, each one like a suite, and we made love in each of them. I had never been happier in all of my twenty-two years. It was total bliss, then. Ethe was enthused about his kernel of an idea, as he liked to call it, and we looked at maps of New Jersey attempting to locate the ideal town where we would live, and the location—not too close to where we would eventually settle—where he would start the business. Ethe was so certain the business would be a success. It didn’t hurt that, even though the textile industry had dried up, the Engroffs had incredible connections throughout the world of finance, along with—I’m afraid this is the way the world works, Baby Amy—political connections.

  Two blissful months of touring the cape and Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. I thought, then, that we could’ve lived there for the rest of our lives. Not long into the second month, I was sure I was pregnant. Ethe was ecstatic. It proved to be a false alarm, but it didn’t matter. We seemed to be utterly perfect for each other, and there was not a single minute, not a single, lovely, blissful minute, we weren’t happy. No spats, no sudden emotional upheavals, no cross moments. Ethe whispered to me one night in one of the six rooms, “We are soul mates, Baby Amy. I know it now and you do, too.”

  Oh, and I did. Yes, I did.

  We rented a house in Long Valley, New Jersey, of all places, the home of Welsh Farms dairy products, when we returned from the cape, or when we returned from “the Engroff Estate,” as I began to call it, loving how it embarrassed Ethe. He began to look for a location for his business, which he’d call TRUAM Quality Packaging. He finally found an out-of-business warehouse that had once been a thriving Farmall Tractor business. A place where tractors, combines, corn pickers, hay balers and hay mowers had been sold and repaired. But farming was all but gone in central New Jersey, and Ethan bought the warehouse and the hundred acres surrounding it for a song. We began to search for a house, our search radiating out from the factory. Finally we found Persia. It was thirty minutes from NYC on the train, thirty minutes to TRUAM Quality Packaging and four and a half hours, on an early Saturday morning, from Sandwich on Cape Cod.

  And only God is cruel enough to take pleasure in the irony that the park in the center of Persia became the deciding factor for us. By all standards it was a beautiful, well-functioning town, with church steeples and a grocery store, a lumber company, a small department store, a liquor store, even a shoe store. We bought in the early 1990s and we were only four miles away from a supermarket. In the late 1800s, Persia was one of the wealthier towns in the region, catering to rich New Yorkers who built large weekend homes there. Ethe and I fell in love with one of the first houses we looked at, and we bought it. It was on a two-acre estate and had once been owned by a distant scion of the Vanderbilt family.

  “If it’s good enough for the Vanderbilts,” Ethan said one night over a glass of wine at Vito’s, a restaurant on the Persia square, “it’s good enough for us.”

  We clinked glasses, but I knew he didn’t care that a Vanderbilt had owned it. His own privileged upbringing left him unimpressed with the upper classes. Now this house, these lawns and patios, this swimming pool and guesthouse, were Engroff property, and that was all that mattered for the both of us.

  Just as Ethe predicted, the business prospered. He began manufacturing boxes for some of the most famous companies and brands in the world: Brooks Brothers, Wempe Jewelers. I went back for my masters in English Lit. at Rutgers, considered extending the program to pursue a PhD. The dean of the department was a lovely, intelligent man whom I adored. He encouraged me to continue and I had every intention of doing so. Then, in 1992, I became pregnant with Truman. I finished my master’s carrying my heavy boy, waddling around the Rutgers campus with a book bag strapped to my back and Truman in the front, and I had never been happier in my life.

  Truman was born on September 6, 1993. Truman Abcott Engroff. I had settled upon Truman years before, in the Berkshire Mountains. Abcott was my last name, and Ethan insisted.

  “Your family is part of this, Baby Amy. Our family has already hogged enough of the fanfare: Truman and Engroff.”

  I was pleased and touched. I was in love with my husband and my beautiful baby boy. Bliss!

  Ethan wept the first time he picked Truman up, then we opened a bottle of champagne and toasted to our wonderful, quiet boy.

  It was true Truman seemed more like me. It wasn’t that Ethe always had that edge to him, but I didn’t know when he would retreat and ignore me, and even Truman. As the years passed by and Ethan’s dark periods increased in frequency and duration, it was then that Truman began to kiss me on top of the head.

  I knew how much Ethan loved me and Truman. There was no doubt in my mind concerning that, but after a while I got tired of asking him what was wrong and, increasingly, uncomfortable that Truman was watching all of it play out. Then, when he turned thirteen, he, too, began to withdraw. It was a slow process, but I felt it happening from the beginning and as time went on his moods often became as mercurial as were Ethan’s.

  I d
on’t think it was his homosexuality that caused Truman to escape into privacy, even though it coincided with his coming-out to Ethan and then, months afterward, to me. It was Truman, after all, and he was not embarrassed about the truth of who he was. No, I don’t think so. It was more the years of Ethan turning his back on us—at times, that is; Ethe was not a demon, but observing that experience taught Truman to distance himself from other people. I think that as a teenager Truman saw advantages in obfuscating some of his world from me just as his father had for all those years.

  I gradually felt the alliance I’d relied upon for so long evaporating like a perfume scent. The very fact that he had confided in Ethan before me on the issue of his being gay alarmed me. He began to see me, often, as a nuisance in his life—too prying, too concerned, too there. I loved them both, though. They were my life, Truman and Ethan, with their lovely, enigmatic minds.

  In the end it was Ethan who decided we would not have a private burial. It was Ethan who allowed that detective to interfere in my grief over my son, my Truman. It was Ethan who stood at the bedroom window looking out at our lawns with his back to me, his strong and steady and reasonable back, without the slightest sense that at any moment I could be carried away, never to return to this house and to the possibility that soon Truman would be here.

  Goddamn you, Ethan, I thought as I stood there looking at his back that had turned away from me so many times before. Goddamn you! Goddamn that it wasn’t you instead of my lovely Truman.

  Carly

  Seven days after Truman’s death

  Never! Never again! Not ever fucking again! That’s what I said to myself over and over. Tommy Beck is dead to me. What he did to Steve Brown—broke his nose so badly he required plastic surgery, a broken cheekbone, two broken ribs—I would never be with Tommy Beck again. There were no charges pressed, because we’d all been drinking, most of us smoking weed. When the cops came, we had to stash everything. Most people split, including Tommy, but I stayed with Steve. I was not about to leave him in the condition he was in.