Always Box Set

by Ward, Susan

  I stared into the room, my heart a painful knot in my throat. My God, was that Sammy? The last time I’d seen him he was six. He was just shy of eight now—but fuck, how could a little boy change so much so quickly?

  It underscored the truth I’d avoided: the last two years I’d been a horrible father as well. Somehow in my obsession over Lena I’d escaped that failure.

  He stood there, staring at me, beside Walter.

  “Oh, Sammy, let me look at my boy,” I said, crossing the room to give him a hug, but he didn’t hug me back and I didn’t blame him.

  “It’s good to see you, Dad.”

  Oh fuck, that pierced my center brutally.

  I crouched down until we were at eye level. “I love you, Sammy. I’m glad you’re home, and you are not ever leaving again.”

  ~~~

  Liam was right. A good marriage took work. There was no way to describe what it took to put together a fractured family. We both had active careers, and Lena returning to the New York Philharmonic didn’t make our schedule easier. She had rehearsals and performances. My time was booked for a year. Commitments to Columbia Records, the peace movement, and weeks on the road.

  As hard as it was, somehow we slowly eased into a better place throughout the months of ’68. The three of us were a family, not like it had been, because none of us—not me or Lena or even Sammy—were who we’d been.

  But the problems were still there.

  Beneath the surface.

  I knew it and I suspected Lena did as well.

  There was no shortage of love, so whatever nipped at us, threatening everything we were trying to build, I figured would be cured if we kept working at it.

  Only, our problems were different from Lena’s perspective, and I was still making the same mistake thinking we were traveling on the same road.

  Thirty

  I came off eight weeks on the road, dead tired, trying to keep up with each demand on my life, and somehow brought the movement home with me.

  Patty and George, married now, were living in New York and fervently vocal peace activists of some fame. George specialized in civil rights law—and other things— things I didn’t dare tell Lena about.

  She already thought they were too radical. My involvement with them would have terrified her and sent her into fits.

  I’d successfully kept the parts of my life separate, only somehow this night I hadn’t. Long before ’68 I was all-in, a true believer in what we were trying to accomplish. True, it had started as me trying to make up for whatever my part was in what had happened to Reggie by picking up his causes, but it had evolved in the two years Lena had been away into something as much a part of me as her, music, and Sammy.

  Maybe that’s why I’d brought our circle home, subconsciously ready to end Jack living a double life. Only it wasn’t Good Time Jack versus married Jack. It was Jack who loved Lena versus Jack who was tired of being only a part of the man I was while with her.

  Shit, I don’t know.

  Maybe I was just hurt that she didn’t understand the things I did and believed in.

  We had a wide variety of covert operations that were hidden beneath my very vocal words. I never got too close to what our group did. I funded. I was at meetings like the one in my living room this night, but fuck, they were breaking the law and I was a senator’s son—still, even though he shunned and criticized me regularly in the press.

  Catching me as an active participant in something would have risked Patty and Georgie and everyone. Worse, the FBI—who had me on a watch list—were itching for me to make a mistake.

  Nope, bringing this mob to my living room was not a smart move for a variety of reasons, but I did it anyway.

  The longer the meeting went on, the louder we got. We argued about everything. True democracy at work, Patty liked to say, since she was the one always arguing over everything.

  They needed money.

  Trips across the border.

  Safe houses in Canada.

  Setting up the support structure once we got the objectors to the draft out of the country; that’s where Georgie came in. He knew every useless fact about everything, only now they weren’t useless.

  Civil rights law was his forte, but fuck, he could fake identification and funnel money to ex-pats in ways even the government couldn’t figure out.

  Only tonight we weren’t plotting the escape of draft dissidents. Nope, the two boys in my living room were the subject of a manhunt for something they’d done in the heat of the chaos after a protest had turned violent.

  Fuck, they were just kids.

  Not that much older than Sammy.

  They didn’t want to die.

  Not in a war none of us believed in.

  As far as I was concerned, there was enough blame to go around everywhere for what had gone down and what these kids did.

  No questions asked.

  I brought them home until Georgie could figure out how to get them out of the country.

  Around three in the morning, my bedroom door opened, only I was too focused on Patty to notice.

  “I want everyone out of here now, Jack. Make them go. And I don’t want them ever to come back. Not here. Not ever.”

  Startled, I looked up to find Lena standing rigid and incensed in the doorway, and everyone staring at me, embarrassed, from around the table.

  It was a humiliating moment for the both of us, so I opted for glib and good-natured as the safest response. “Nope, doll. Can’t do that.”

  “Our son sleeps in the next room, Jack. How could you bring these people here? Do you want Sammy hurt by this madness, too?”

  “These boys aren’t much older than Sammy, Lena. Do you really want us to raise our son without any principles?”

  She lifted her chin.

  “I won’t have my life ruined a second time for things that don’t matter. I won’t have our son’s future ruined for things that won’t ever matter. This stops now.”

  I was furious, but I had the good grace not to show it as I calmly rose from my chair.

  “That’s not going to happen, but I am also not going to stand on the sidelines and be silent. I couldn’t live with myself if I did. I don’t know how you could ask me to.”

  Her eyes locked on mine. “I ask you because I love you and I won’t bury another man I love.”

  The flush ran over my face even though I fought not to let it. From second time to another man—translation: Gustavo and Reggie—she had flung it in my face, there, after a year of us ignoring what had happened between them.

  Everything around me felt as if it’d frozen with her words, and time hovered heavily in an excruciating silence as I struggled for the right words, words that wouldn’t hurt her and words I could say.

  “Come on, everyone. We can do the rest of what we need to from our apartment,” Georgie said, his voice pulling me from the trance of Lena’s gaze.

  “You don’t have to go,” I said firmly, not looking at George.

  “Yes, Jack, we do,” he said, patting me on the back as the chairs scraped against the floor.

  The door closed and there was stillness again in the room.

  “That was uncalled for, Lena. You embarrassed us both.”

  She moved swiftly across the room and tossed the daily newspapers on the table, her body crackling with her temper.

  “You’re drunk, like you always are when you come off the road, or you would have never brought them here. It’s dangerous. You know that, somewhere inside that stubborn head of yours. Please, you need to stop this now.”

  Same song. New verse.

  “I can’t. It’s too important. Someone has to step up and say and do what’s right.”

  “It doesn’t have to be you. We have our own problems we need to fix. You have a family. Us, Jack. We should come first. Damn it, you foolish boy, it’s dangerous.”

  Foolish boy. That blew the lid off my lovestruck, ever pres
ent deference with Lena for the first time since we’d gotten back together again.

  “Did you say that to Gustavo Reyes? Stop. It’s dangerous. No. Probably not. You probably didn’t even say that to Reggie.”

  If I’d hit her, the blow of my words wouldn’t have been more visible on her face.

  “Stop trying to be who you think you need to be for me to love you. Be who you are. The boy I fell in love with. You don’t have to be anything more than who you were when we met in Santa Barbara to have me.”

  “I’m not trying to be anyone other than who I am. I’m just being me, Lena. Or rather, the me I am when I’m not with you.”

  “No, you are not. You would never speak to me that way if you were my Jack right now. Please stop this. I can’t take any more. I love you, but I can’t fix what we need to fix without you.”

  I pressed my palm into my head and squeezed tightly. I knew the things she said were serious and important to her and to us. The problem was—

  I shut down that thought before I finished it.

  “My activities have nothing to do with us, Lena.”

  She flinched as though I’d slapped her because activities was a loaded word between us, a euphemism for the many things I’d done while we were apart.

  “Of course it does, Jack. Everything about you is a part of me. And I’m telling you, we don’t need any of this for me to love you.”

  I stared at her, my heart torn in two.

  Was that really what she thought?

  That the things I dedicated myself to were nothing more than a feeble attempt to replace Gustavo Reyes and Reggie in her heart.

  Staring at her now, I saw things I hadn’t seen before.

  Things I didn’t want to see.

  Things that made me feel a fool.

  Reggie hadn’t finished the thought in his journal—hell, I’d never talked about it with Lena—but I could see it on her face tonight. She’d loved him.

  “Do you think I don’t know that nothing I do will ever replace Gustavo Reyes in your heart, Lena? Or Reggie, for that matter, since we’re being honest here for a change.”

  Her entire face went crimson as her shoulders squared. “How could you say that to me?”

  “Why the hell did you marry me, Lena? Did you ever even love me?”

  Those eyes I loved—the eyes that haunted me with every woman I was with in the time we lived apart, and then later forgave me when I wanted her to come back to me—flashed and then lost their sparkle.

  “I’m leaving, Jack, with Sammy in the morning. I can’t live with you anymore. Don’t come after me. I won’t come back. I can’t, Jack. No matter how much I love you I can’t stay and watch what you are doing to yourself.”

  ~~~

  I will never know for sure if Lena would have walked out on me again. The next morning, before she’d packed, the phone rang.

  “Jack, it’s Gloria.”

  I opened my eyes to find Lena standing beside the couch where I’d slept. I raked the hair back from my face, resisted the nag from my stomach to vomit, and frowned up at her. “Gloria? Is that a joke?”

  She shook her head, holding the phone to me.

  “Hang it up, Lena.”

  “No, Jack. This call you’ve got to take.”

  Lena’s voice ran down my spine like a chill.

  I was fully awake now.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, held the receiver out, and looked away.

  “Gloria? What’s going on?” I asked into the phone.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d wanted me to, but I thought I should call, Jack.”

  I tensed, since even if it hadn’t been the first time one of them had called since ’62, I could tell by her voice this wasn’t good.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked, burying my face in my hand because, fuck, I could feel I was near to tossing my stomach.

  “Your father had a stroke last night. He’s in the hospital. They don’t expect him to make it, Jackie. I thought you might want to come and see him before it’s too late.”

  Click.

  I stared at the receiver, my thoughts and emotions scattering in every direction. Shit, I hadn’t spoken to my father in nearly seven years. He’d let me know, repeatedly in the press, how much of a disappointment I was to him.

  He’d turned his back on me first, but the truth was we’d turned our backs on each other.

  Lena slipped an arm around me and lifted the phone from my hand. “We’re going, Jack. Take a shower while I pack for us. He’s your father. Nothing else but that matters.”

  I did as Lena told me, but mostly because she said we were going.

  We could afford pretty much anything we wanted now, but I never traveled by private plane unless the label covered it. This day Lena made us. Gloria had sounded grim, and Lena insisted we get there quickly so I wouldn’t miss my last chance to talk to my father.

  I stared out the airplane window, lost in old thoughts—my childhood, my father, our years of fighting—and new thoughts I didn’t want visited me as well. The trip to Santa Barbara after Lena and I married. How I held Sammy and pointed out the window, telling him this would always be his home. I’d meant it, but it was meaningless because I’d never brought him back here. As meaningless as the promise I made to myself, in the kitchen of our house in Cambridge, never to be the kind of father my father had been.

  Christ, my father was dying and I was sitting beside my son, and I didn’t know either of them really.

  Tears burned my eyes.

  I’d become exactly the kind of father the senator had been.

  Thirty-One

  When we arrived at the hospital, Gloria was crying outside my father’s room and surrounded by doctors.

  I hurried toward her and she surprised me by closing in for a hug, and I surprised myself by giving it.

  “Oh, Jackie, thank God you’re here!” She was sobbing and holding onto me.

  “Jesus Christ, Pop’s still with us, isn’t he?”

  She looked up then and brushed back her tears. “He’s a fighter, Jack. He may pull through yet. Doctors don’t know everything. But—”

  My insides turned to ice. “But what?”

  “They don’t think he’ll ever fully recover. It was a massive stroke. Right now, I’m not sure he even understands what’s happened to him.”

  My arms tightened around her. “It will be OK, Gloria. Pop is a fighter, you’re right about that. Would it be OK if I went in? Saw him now?”

  She nodded, stepped back, and noticed Lena and Sammy standing in the hallway. “Oh, Jack, you brought your family.” Third surprise—she sounded touched and not angry. She looked at Sammy and smiled. “You don’t know me but I’m your father’s mother. Well, his stepmother, but I’m pretty sure that makes me your grandmother. Would that be OK with you?”

  Sammy nodded and Gloria’s sadness-laced smile grew larger. “Go see your father, Jack. He can only have one visitor at a time right now. I’ve been at the hospital for days. I need a few hours’ sleep, but I don’t want Jackson to be alone. Why don’t I take Lena and Sammy back to the house to get settled in? I’ll come back to spell you at the hospital later.”

  Take Lena and Sammy back to the house?

  I was anxious to see my father, but suddenly not sure what I should do because Gloria wasn’t behaving at all like I’d expected her to, and history warned me I shouldn’t leave my wife alone with her. Things were troubled enough in my marriage without adding my stepmother to the mix.

  Lena came and gave me a kiss. “We’ll be fine, Jack. Spend some time with your father alone and don’t worry about us.”

  I sank my teeth into my lower lip to keep back the emotion, and jutted my chin in response before I went in.

  Just inside the door, I hung back, staring, as I tried to collect myself. The strongest man I’d ever known was lying on a bed, hooked up to machines, eyes open but not lookin
g like they were seeing anything. He looked older, silver now mixed with his blond waves. The bright blue of his eyes had dulled a bit, and if not for the ventilator he wouldn’t even have been able to take in air on his own.

  I could see it on his face. After all the years of fighting—in the political world and with me—he didn’t have any fight left for himself.

  We’d never agreed on anything, or rather only agreed on one thing—I was his son and he was my father—and it should have accounted for more, taken us someplace better than where we were today.

  Two people in one spot, arriving too late.

  I was pretty sure Gloria could see that Pop would never recover in spite of what she’d said to me in the hallway.

  I sank in the chair beside his bed and took his hand. It was quiet in the room, even with the sound of the machines, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in years, a kind of quietness in me.

  I wasn’t going to leave again, not until it was over.

  I owed my father that.

  ~~~

  A month later, my father was still unresponsive—the doctors were pretty sure he couldn’t hear or see. They told me that after finding me reading Hemmingway to him, The Old Man and the Sea, his favorite or so Gloria had informed me—but hanging on. Unchanged from when I’d arrived, but thankfully, no worse.

  “Jack, can I talk to you privately, please?”

  I looked up from the book to find the doctor standing in the hospital room doorway.

  I set down the book. “Everything is all right, isn’t it?”

  He gestured me into the hallway. “Your father is still stable. But he’s not going to come out of this, no matter what Gloria thinks.”

  I nodded, shoving my hands deeply into my pockets. “She just needs time to let go, Dr. Perkins. Let her have the time she needs to get through this.”

  “It could be months. Years. And a hospital room isn’t where he should be any longer. Gloria refuses to accept that.”

  I shook my head. “No nursing home. We’ll bring him home—”

  “Jack, that’s not practical or in his best interest.”