The Love Children

by Marylin French

  We planned to leave at the end of the week and Mrs. Lipkin had asked me to cook a special dinner for Sandy’s (and my) last night at home. Naomi was speechless—with anger, I suppose—that Sandy was not only abandoning her but also leaving her with the responsibility for their mother; Mrs. Lipkin was still on tranquilizers and barely aware of what was happening around her. I didn’t see how Sandy could leave, but I also didn’t see how she could stay. The impossibility added to the urgency. I sensed she was running for her life.

  On Wednesday night, I roasted a leg of lamb, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, and everybody ate heartily. Even Mrs. Lipkin ate something. There was such a gentleness and grace about her. I felt sorry for her, but after a while, you expect a person to bounce back and start functioning, and if they don’t, you begin to blame them. I’m not saying I was right, but that’s what I felt. I thought, her daughters need her and it’s her responsibility because she’s the mommy. Obviously, I didn’t think mommies had the right to break down, to fall apart, to fail their children. Daddies either, for that matter.

  The next day, I packed my duffel and drove over to Sandy’s, who had packed one too, and once more we set out to find a Connolly at an unknown address.

  11

  So there we were, on the road together in early January 1973, homing in on Bishop. I took the Mass Pike to Becket, a long, long ride through empty hills and sky. It was beautiful out there. When you grow up in an urban area, you don’t realize how much open space there is in this country. Once we got off the Mass Pike, we had to go by feel. We went too far and stumbled into Monterey, a lovely town with a general store and a post office. We turned north again toward Becket. Snow was piled high at the roadside and on tree limbs and bushes. We reached a little town, Tyringham, and had lunch there, in a place my mother would have chosen, a little, locally-owned storefront restaurant called Ginger and Pepper. Ginger did the cooking, excellently, as it turned out. We had a delicious cream of asparagus soup and omelets with cheese and spinach. I told Ginger how much I liked her cooking and asked about Pepper. This endeared me to her and an hour and a half later, we were still there, Ginger leaning on her broom, telling us about her perfectly organized life, her four kids, her husband, and—the main focus of conversation—her worthless sister Pepper. She’d brought Pepper into the business to please her mother, but Pepper had contributed little and now did nothing at all, despite her name on the window.

  I wanted to ask Ginger about the commune, but after listening to her commentary, I had doubts about how she’d receive such a question. Better Sandy should ask: she was dignified and ladylike, and Ginger would treat her gingerly, I thought, smirking at my own pun. I tried to signal Sandy to risk the question, but she wouldn’t. So eventually I thought of a maneuver.

  “You know, we’re up here searching for a friend. A high school friend. There was a death in his family and he’s out of touch with them, and we knew he’d want to know, so we’re looking for him. He’s somewhere in this area, on a commune. Do you know of one around here?”

  Her face changed. “Commune? Bunch of hippies?” She examined us more carefully.

  “Yes. That’s what we heard. We don’t know where it is. But we thought it was really important that he know,” Sandy said with a mournful look.

  “Oh, yeah.” She thought it over. Our long hair and jeans made us questionable, but we were clean, well spoken, and polite. We had praised her cooking and sympathized about her sister. She decided in our favor.

  “Well, there is one out toward Becket. You go down this road as far as the body shop, then turn right. Go about two miles until you come to a gas station. There’s a little dirt road leading off to the left. Take it as far as a farm with chicken coops; you can’t miss it. Then make a left and go, oh, I don’t know, a few miles, until you see a fork in the road. There’s a big oak tree in a triangle of grass, and you take the right fork. Just keep going until you see a red barn. Turn down the next driveway; that’s them.

  “They come into town sometimes, bringing eggs to the grocery store, trading them for laundry soap and whatnot. I don’t deal with them. They live in sin. You girls don’t stay there, just tell your friend what he has to know and get out, you hear? Smoking dope and living in sin, no life for decent girls.”

  Sandy and I gave each other frightened looks, which seemed to satisfy her, and paid the bill and left.

  “I guess we won’t be able to have lunch there anymore,” Sandy said as we left. “Too bad—that soup was delicious.”

  Ignorant as we were about life on a commune, we had no idea that lunch in a restaurant would quickly become an unattainable luxury for us.

  It took us longer than it should have, since we got lost and had to retrace our route and get directions from someone else, then got lost again, and might never have found the commune if we hadn’t come across a UPS delivery man. Sandy ran up to him as he was getting back in his truck and, near tears, begged him for directions. He accommodatingly told us to follow him, and he drove us right to the commune. Around five in the afternoon, waving good-bye to him, we pulled into a long, muddy driveway that ran up to a ramshackle house with gray shingles, many turrets, and what had once been white trim. There was a red barn farther down the drive and some horses in a field.

  We got out of the car and walked up the creaky wooden steps of the house. A storm door led to a glassed-in porch with some shabby furniture covered in old blankets. We opened the door and walked onto the porch; there didn’t seem to be a doorbell. We knocked on the house door. Nothing happened. After a while, we tried the doorknob. The door was unlocked. We opened it, stepped over the threshold, and called, “Bishop? Anyone? Hello?”

  Rock music—I recognized the Dead—was blaring. We walked into the small living room, which had a couch and a few chairs and a small stereo set on a table. We walked through the living room into a big kitchen, where two women stood at the stove, one stirring a pot, the other peeling apples. They glanced over at us. The kitchen was toasty warm, heated by a big wood stove in the middle of the room.

  “Hi,” we said uncertainly. “Sorry for the intrusion, but we knocked . . .”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s okay,” one woman said. “When the radio’s on, we don’t hear anything.” She was about my age, nineteen or twenty, and she was wearing a kerchief on her head. It made her look old-fashioned. Like a servant.

  “We’re looking for Bishop Connolly. Is this where he lives?”

  “Yes. You’re friends of Bishop’s?”

  “Yes. From Cambridge.”

  They both smiled at us. “Are you Jess and Sandy, by any chance?”

  “Yes!”

  “Does Bish know? He’ll be over the moon! He talks about you two all the time. Take off your coats. This is the only room in the house that’s warm.” She laughed. “I’m Rebecca, and this is Bernice.”

  We made ourselves comfortable. The kitchen was big, with an old round wooden table in the center and a variety of chairs set around it. Old rockers and shabby armchairs were placed around the room; a breakfront stood against one wall, holding assorted dishes, many of them chipped or cracked. I guessed that this was the room they mostly lived in.

  Rebecca was small and thin, with a delicate face, deep-set eyes, and dark, very curly hair. Bernice was taller and blonde, with a round face and small blue eyes.

  They made coffee for us in a big aluminum drip pot, older than any coffeepot I had ever seen, and they chatted easily, working the whole time. They were preparing dinner—cabbage soup, millet and red beans with onions and chopped greens. Not too much work, except the millet, but they were also making a bunch of pies. I offered to help and ended up chopping apples and squash for the pies, which they were making with Crisco. My mother would have been outraged.

  They told us about the other people in the commune. The oldest member, a founder, and someone we knew about, was Brad d’Alessio, whom Bishop had met in Nevada at the dude ranch. He was a dropout from UCLA and a friend of Bernic
e’s. He had started the commune with Charlotte Kislik and Jerry Matthews, the three of them old UCLA friends. They had pooled their cash and had bought the old house for practically nothing, because it had no electricity or municipal water supply.

  It was in terrible repair: in the first year they had to put a new roof on it. They were handy, and they got jobs in town and little by little made it livable. They installed a generator and began to plant the land, living in harmony until Charlotte and Jerry left to join some more radical friends who were impatient to change the country. They were now in hiding after a bomb they’d planted exploded at Enterprise University in Wisconsin, killing a night watchman. Bernice hinted that Brad knew where they were, and Rebecca told us, in whispered horror, that the FBI had been around, questioning him. But he claimed to know nothing.

  Brad was a leftist, but against violence. He’d avoided the draft thus far and intended, if he was called up, to claim that he was a pacifist. Bernice insisted that he had never endorsed what Charlotte and Jerry had done. Not that we thought it was so terrible—except that they were careless about the watchman. After Charlotte and Jerry had left, Brad stayed on in the house alone, but he couldn’t manage and was about to give up, when Bernice, Rebecca, and then Bishop arrived. I deduced from what Bernice said that Brad received them with despairing gratitude. He already had some horses—he knew a lot about horses—and he and Bishop developed a horse-training school and gave riding lessons. That kept them afloat for a while.

  Bernice had left UCLA because of a failed love affair. During her sophomore year, her English professor, Gregory, had come on to her, and in time, she had fallen in love with him. But after a year, he dropped her for another student. She couldn’t believe it and wouldn’t back off gracefully. She hung around him constantly, visiting his apartment, haunting his office. She felt he had just made a mistake and would remember that he loved her if he just looked at her the right way.

  “I couldn’t help it. I hated myself, but I just kept showing up during his office hours, day after day. He told me he was going to call the police if I didn’t leave him alone. But I just couldn’t. Has anything like that ever happened to you?”

  “It sounds like you really loved him,” said Sandy, ever the diplomat.

  “Oh, I adored him. I’d have died for him. I couldn’t understand why he’d want to leave someone who loved him the way I did.”

  I thought anybody would want to leave a person who loved them that way.

  “Brad and I were still corresponding. We were pals during freshman year, though he was older than I was. He convinced me that the way to Greg’s heart was to leave him. If he was without me, he’d start to long for me, Brad said. So I thought I’d try it. I wrote a letter to Greg, telling him I was leaving, but giving him my home address. I went back to San Diego and waited for six months, but I never heard from him. And I was working at McDonald’s, which is lethal, I kid you not! And my mother . . . well, she was pressuring me to go back to school. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Then Rebecca came to work at McDonald’s—she’d dropped out of UCLA too.” Bernice turned to Rebecca, who picked up the narrative.

  “Yes, that was amazing! Kindred souls selling Big Macs! Actually, I ran out of money after my sophomore year. I was working to save up to go back to school. But some days it seemed like it wasn’t worth it. Such disgusting work. I couldn’t eat anything while I worked there. I lost fifteen pounds. The smell of grease . . .”

  “And I told her about Brad and the commune, and she was fascinated . . .”

  “It sounded ideal. I had always thought there should be another way to live. I didn’t want to live like my parents. My father was a lawyer and I never saw him, he was always at work and he was so driven and, well, nasty, really. My mother was discontented even though she had this big house and fancy car and ladies to play golf with and a maid and all these clothes.”

  “Me too.” Bernice said. “My father was very religious, a bulwark of the Episcopal Church. My mother was fragile, and he took care of her; he adored her. They were sweet, but it was so boring, their life, so repetitious; there was nothing in it, I felt. I wanted a little adventure, a little risk.”

  “And I felt there should be sharing and equality in life.” Rebecca said. “Even before . . . well, my father got into some trouble. I don’t know what he did exactly, but the government was after him for something, taxes maybe, hounding him, and he paid some fine. It was millions of dollars. He lost everything and then he had a heart attack and died, and my mother had to go on welfare and you should have heard her then!”

  “Oh!” Sandy exclaimed in horror.

  “Yeah. There wasn’t even enough money for me to go to school, so I worked hard and got a scholarship, but my mother was in such bad straits, I quit after two years and got a job. I was living with her in San Diego, in a little apartment, and working in McDonald’s, which was all I could get. It was horrendous; I hated it, but I was helping to support her.

  “She felt horribly guilty making me quit college and do such disgusting work, and she pulled herself together and took a course to brush up on her skills. She got a job in a law office—before she met Daddy, she’d been a legal secretary. And before you knew it—bingo!—she landed herself another lawyer!” Rebecca laughed.

  “Good for her!” Sandy exclaimed.

  “We-ell,” Rebecca said, “he was married. But he left his wife for her and bought her another nice house, if not as nice as the one my father had bought us, but she was grateful for it; she was happy. I think she did it for me. So I could leave. By then, Bernice and I were friends, and we decided to hitch out here and see the commune and maybe stay here.”

  Bernice picked it up. “I was scared to do it, but with Rebecca I was less scared, you know? So we came and I loved it here and Brad and I—well, we’d only been friends at school—but we hit it off when we met again. Maybe we were ready for each other. So I stayed.”

  “Bernice and I ran the farm in those days, not that we knew much about farming . . .”

  “We learned. We learned a lot. But now more people have come, and we do everything. We help with the horses once in a while, with the farm most of the time, and in the house, often. Like now,” she laughed, holding up a lump of pastry dough.

  “Did Gregory ever write?” I wanted to know.

  Bernice shook her head grimly. “Never. And don’t tell Brad, but to this day I’m mad for him. How do you fall out of love with someone?”

  It was an interesting question.

  The newcomers were Stepan, Cynthia, and Lysanne, they said. Stepan was from the Soviet Union, Ukraine. He didn’t have a green card and couldn’t work legally. He had lived on a farm as a kid, before they sent him to engineering college, and he knew when to do what you had to do on a farm—plant, water, weed, whatever. He and Lysanne worked the farm while Bishop and Brad ran the horse ranch. They cared for the horses—fed them, exercised them, swept up the shit, and groomed them. Cynthia, who also helped with the labor of the animals, was in charge of the riding classes. She had been to school in England and had a license. The classes were open to anyone in the area; there were seven students.

  “The riding academy brings in about half of our cash,” Rebecca explained, “not that it’s very much. We charge fifteen dollars a lesson, which means we can count on about a hundred dollars a week, given absences. It’s not really enough to keep us. We eat the vegetables we grow, but we need an awful lot of other things—oats and millet and brown rice, for instance—and we need money for things like toilet paper and gas for the truck and fuel for the generator. Just keeping the generator going is tough. We have enough trees for wood to keep us warm in this room; we take turns chopping it. She laughed, holding up her arm to show us the muscles.

  The pies were almost finished baking and dinner was ready when the back door opened and the aroma of horse manure penetrated the kitchen.

  “Phew!” Bernice cried.

  “I know, I know!” a woman�
��s voice called back. “I’ll go back out.” The door closed again.

  “That’s Cynthia. She cleans herself up in the stables, but sometimes there’s horse shit on the path and it sticks to her boots.”

  The door opened again. “There! Is that better?” the voice cried.

  “Yeah!” both girls yelled.

  There was a rustle of clothes being removed and a third woman entered the kitchen. Cynthia was taller than Bernice, slender, and athletic. She had long hair and wore blue jeans on her long, skinny legs. She stopped in surprise when she saw us.

  Rebecca introduced us.

  “Bishop’s friends?” she asked. “He’ll flip!”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’ll be coming in soon. He and Brad are repairing the north corral—a couple of logs rotted out. They’re just finishing up.”

  The door opened again and a man and woman entered: Stepan and Lysanne, I guessed. Stepan was huge, tall and heavy, with a round face and thickish lips. He had large, pale blue eyes and was good-looking, with a sullen mouth that reminded me of Marlon Brando. Lysanne was small and very thin, but wiry; she looked strong enough to be a wrestler. She had bright pink cheeks and bright brown eyes and a happy expression, as if all the fresh air she worked in had cleansed her entire being. I liked her at first sight. I liked Stepan too; I wondered whose lover he was. It was going to take a while to sort out the dynamics of this place, I thought.

  Then the back door opened again, revealing a tall, pale, skinny boy. There was electricity in the air as he entered. The whole kitchen stopped talking, watching his face, waiting. He looked around, a bit bewildered—what was going on? He spotted us, didn’t take us in, then did, and his face exploded. He was smiling, then his body hurtled toward us; he was crying as he embraced us both, sobbing. We cried too, partly in shock—we’d never seen Bishop cry before. There was a loud clamor as everybody in the kitchen joined in talking or laughing or crying.