“That’s why I called. So you can tell me what to say.”
“Funny.”
“No. I’m perfectly serious.”
“Well, you know what you want to happen.”
“I know what I don’t want to happen. Those two have never said one word to me about who I am. Just their dumb shitty disapproval. Monty and I would talk, Jill and I talked all the time. They wanted to know me. They did know me.”
“Isn’t all that completely beside the point?”
“Those two probably ran and washed their hands in lye as soon as I left the room. And now they all but feel my pain.”
“Tim, it’s just not relevant. What matters is what you want for Billy and Cindy. You haven’t changed your mind?”
“Oh yeah, like I have a mind. But no, I told you, this is not a solution.”
“What if the kids wanted it? Hypothetically. Would that change anything?”
“Chose them? As in, Check either Box A or Box B?”
“Yes. If you asked them directly.”
“Maybe they aren’t equipped to make that choice. It was the right advice for camp, Ell, but what do they know about storm troopers?”
“That’s extreme, surely. But those kids might surprise you. You could trust them enough to ask.”
“That’s your advice?”
“It would help you get past Earl tomorrow. Which helps your Mom, by keeping the peace.”
“Except that Earl plans to just grab them.”
“Tell him he can’t. Tell him they are expecting you to come get them and how terrible it would be to upset their expectations.”
“Ell, you don’t know this guy. You have no idea how small an impression that suggestion will make on him.”
“All right, then tell him it will constitute kidnapping if he does it, and he will go directly to jail.”
“Not pass Go, not collect two hundred dollars! Now that might do it. I’m so glad you were home.”
“Remember me? I’m always home.”
“Not for long. This new guy…What was his name again?”
“His name was, and is, Victor.”
“Victor. Wow. There it is: the victor. The winner.”
“God, I’m so sorry I told you. It was stupid of me.”
“Victor’s the one, I can feel it. Haven’t I always said what a fine heterosexual Victor is?”
“And he says the same of you, Timmy. Good luck tomorrow.”
Erica and Earl were sequestered in the Chinook (lovebirds, Anne offered; co-conspirators, Tim rebutted) when they went to breakfast. Slim as a girl, famously “a slip of a thing,” Anne did love breakfast out, second only to barbecue. She and Tim had made a tradition of it, after Rex died, of going each time he was home.
For today, he made a rule. To avoid tricky issues, they would play a game, discussing only what they could see. And they would both wear their Gamecocks feedcaps. Down here, folks would smile on a child molester, so long as he wore his Gamecocks cap to breakfast.
“See, Mom?” he said, feeling comfortable with her, feeling she might have regained her comfort with him, as they sat in the Mullins Diner. “I’m just me.”
“I know you are, honey.”
“It’s just sex,” he said, amazed at the liberation of speech. In a way the stakes were raised on this long-deferred conversation, in another way the truth had set him free.
“Don’t break your own rule now.”
“I mean, sex doesn’t exist in this family anyway. You never said one word to me about sex.”
“Nor will I.”
“I don’t mean you and Daddy. I mean the birds and the bees. So why should it even be a topic?”
“It shouldn’t. And it isn’t.”
“I just wish you could see it.”
“That you are otherwise a nice healthy young man?” Anne leaned toward him and whispered, “Are you? Healthy?”
“I’m fine,” he said, and this might be true. Tim wondered if his mother, educated on the epidemic by Oprah Winfrey, would ever in her life pronounce the word gay, or AIDS. “So now let’s just sit and move our jaws over the food, like true sons and daughters of the South.”
“I didn’t start,” she reminded him. Nor did she want him to elaborate. Say he was virus-free and she would, as he expected, be happily finished with the discussion forever.
Had he said that? Should he? Anne would turn seventy-five late this year and a lie (if it was a lie) might well outlast her. There could be one less tragedy in her life, and, this week in particular, that carried a lot of weight.
“Really, Mom,” he reiterated. “I’m fine.” And left it at that.
In the car heading back, Anne reached over to turn off the radio. Nothing to say, as it happened, she just wanted it quiet. Tim steered to the roadbed at a rusted, lowslung bridge that took the Seabird rail line over a narrow bend of Little Lynches River. It was more of a creek here, eight feet wide and shallow. Clear water slipped over the sandy bottom like a thick belt of glass.
“Daddy and I always stopped here,” he said. “Coming back from the sites.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“You are?”
“Yes, I am. And I know what you want to tell me.”
“You do?”
“Yes I do,” she grinned. “So don’t tell me.”
“But now I have to tell, to see if you’re right.”
“He and I did it too,” she said. “And that’s enough.”
“You?”
“Females do such things, yes.”
Such things. Bodily functions! But Anne sounded almost flirtatious, or nostalgic, recalling younger days with Rex.
Under the stand of black willows, Tim and Rex would relieve themselves, side by side. It was unique in Tim’s iconography, a silent statement from Rex that he was not so predictable, or hide-abound: he would piss outdoors.
But Anne would too! How true it was that Tim knew little of his parents’ private lives. Perhaps they had been loud and joyous, jumping one another’s bones the instant the schoolbus pulled away. Perhaps they peed side by side throughout the old New South, skinny-dipped in back country rivers, rolled together in soft green meadows.
“Your father was always impatient that way.”
“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” said Tim, marvelling.
“That’s enough now.”
Anne was smiling, though. Happy memories did not have to make you sad. They had left behind the question of AIDS, it was gone, and now the silent landscape (sandpits, cornfields, persimmons by the highway) lured them along in a parallel silence until they were home.
“I enjoyed my breakfast very much, honey,” said Anne, patting Tim’s hand. “It was a real treat.”
“I can’t talk long,” said Billy.
“Dinner already?”
“No, we’ve got a game. Against the creeps from Badgers.”
“A soccer game?”
“Softball.”
Minimalism was being practiced here. But this was the telephone, there was no way to change it for the better—unless releasing him to play the Badgers constituted improvement.
Tim knew precisely where Billy was sitting, in the knotty pine fastness of Arnold Broom’s office, and he had no doubt the boy resented being there. It was embarrassing to be plucked from the company each evening for a call from home. His bunkmates knew nothing of Billy’s situation.
“Softball, huh. I guess you can’t kick ‘em in the shins.”
“Not really, Unk.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah, so, I gotta go.”
“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” said Tim.
“You want her?”
“Yes, please, Bill. If she’s there.”
Cindy did not sound quite so put upon. By contrast with her brother, she sounded lively and willing.
“Tell me what you ate today,” he said.
“Everything?”
“Yes, please.”
“Cereal. Banana.
Carrot. An apple—”
“Mint patties?”
“Gone. But Cara gave me some of her Hershey bar.”
“That was nice of Cara.”
“Two glasses of milk. Tuna surprise—”
“You? Ate tuna surprise?”
“Bread and butter. Rice pudding—”
“Are you just incredibly fat, from all this eating?”
“I’m the same as I was,” she said, saucily.
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” (She seemed okay.) “Are you having a little fun up there?”
“I want you to come.”
“Take you home, you mean? Come get you?”
“Not sure.”
“But come visit.”
“Yes.”
“You know I’m at Grandma’s, in South Carolina. Do you know how far away that is?”
“Seven hundred miles?”
“I knew you knew. So I can’t really get there right away. Unless it’s an emergency?”
“No.”
“You’re okay.”
“Yes.”
This one-word stuff was a tough pull. Tim’s instinct was to press for answers, which he suspected was wrong, a violation of the Goldsmith Protocols. Probably you should stop at the point they stopped you. Even Anne had constantly stopped him, in gray silent space. Maybe, unlike himself, they knew what they were doing.
“Hang on one second, sweetheart. Grandma wants to say hello.”
Anne did want to say hello, but not much more. She needed to confirm they were not being frozen, starved, or tortured. She had a hard time framing these concerns, and Cindy was not helping. When, very soon, Anne could think of nothing to say, she said “We’ll have a lot to talk about, when you visit me.”
When was the last time she had seen these children? Anne was only guessing, but it was more than a year, possibly closer to two.
Dinner that night was pleasantly chaotic, desultory. Fried chicken, homemade biscuits, and collards, set out on the kitchen counter. You ate whenever, took your plate wherever. Tim followed his mother to the porch.
“That’s all you’re eating?” he said.
“I nibbled while I was cooking. And I have been eating like there’s no tomorrow since you all came.”
“Let me get you something to drink, at least.”
“You can get me something too,” said Erica, joining them.
“Our usual,” said Anne, smiling as she patted Tim’s arm. She had been patting him a lot, both to reassure him and to reassure herself he was still there. Ordering their “usual” was a clear statement, for this was a ‘normalcy thing’ between them, like the bacon and eggs in Mullins. Anne took one deep draught from the bottle of beer he brought out, then handed the balance back to Tim.
“I do like that top drop,” she said. “The very coldest one.”
“It’s good for the heart,” said Tim, handing a second bottle to his sister.
“So was hearing those two on the telephone. It was nice we all got on.”
“Kids actually hate that sort of thing.”
“Whoa,” said Erica. “The expert on childhood speaks.”
Tim spun toward her and she flinched (or he thought she did) as if she expected him to smack her. This softened his response considerably. Ric had come on like a midsummer night’s Santa Claus, with a VCR for the two of them, Earl’s card collection for Billy. Baldfaced bribery, Tim had nearly screamed, and he might have screamed it now. Instead, he was gentle, conciliatory.
“Don’t you know what I mean? Like on birthdays, when we had to wade through all the aunts and cousins?”
Erica granted him a shrug of acknowledgement.
“They know we are all there for them,” said Anne. “Whatever the mechanics of conversation, Timmy.”
“Just for the record, though, we did not all get on. If Earl is part of all, then Earl did not get on.”
“Oh, you needn’t be so literal, honey.”
“Literal isn’t the point. The point—just for the record—is that Earl has never said five words to those two. He wouldn’t even be able to fake it.”
“Will you hush,” said Erica. “It’s not true, but let’s don’t argue about it during supper.”
“Hear hear,” said Anne, moving a wayward strand of hair from Erica’s brow, brushing it back past her temple.
Anne had bought two caskets of dark, lacquered mahogany. The ashes would be placed inside them, a costly compromise between Jill’s choice of cremation and her mother’s need to have a gravesite.
“I’ll need to visit, and tend her spirit.”
“It’s fine, Mom, it’s good. The kids can visit too. They can know where she is.”
So the utilitarian plastic boxes from J.J. Mulhern’s were set inside the fancy coffins without ever having been opened. Those boxes might contain the residue of somebody’s cookout, Earl joked, in complete bad taste. Tim had regained his cool so thoroughly that Erica was the one who had to silence her husband.
It wasn’t really cool, though, it was shock. Certainly at the graveside it was. These ashes were Jill. Jill was these ashes. Tim was barely hanging on.
Forty-odd people were at the church service. In the frontmost pew, flanked by her children and her brother Jim, Anne sat at attention, head perfectly still, hands in her lap, until the organ sounded the opening notes of “How Great Thou Art.” At that she spilled open in gasping convulsions. Tim and Erica braced her from either side, but Tim feared her bones might fly apart. “That’s when I always go off,” she said later, dismissively, though she had “gone off” a number of other times, at random. “That song. Even when I don’t particularly care for the deceased.”
About half the congregation came on to the cemetery, where a single wide excavation had been cut for the two coffins, not eight feet from where Rex lay buried. Anne made no sound, no movement though all through the Lord’s Prayer two streams of tears, sharply defined by the sunlight, runneled down her cheeks.
There were cakes and coffee at the house, provided by friends. Anne had tried to retain the job, arguing that she would welcome such distraction, but this was not the way it was done in Berline. Edna Jackson made the cakes, Mary Reidesel did the rest.
“I thought everyone had a nice enough time,” Anne said, to no one in particular, after the mourners had departed. She was being brave, of course, but it seemed to everyone that she had retreated into some benign survivalist mode of temporary insanity. More than once, Tim heard the teaparty laugh leaking out of her.
It was almost comical how they left it to the last possible moment, dusk of the final night, to stage their confrontation. At that hour, beyond the cast of the porch light, they were at the mercy of half a million mosquitoes.
“Explain this to me, Earl. We both know you never wanted anything to do with kids. So what is this?”
“That’s all right, Timmy, you never wanted kids, either.”
“The truth is I did sort of want kids.”
“Couldn’t get pregnant?”
A mosquito the size of a sparrow lanced Tim’s wrist, while another one was landing in his ear. He sensed a mass of them hovering like a magic carpet, humming like high-tension wires.
“I understood it was part of the price for being single.”
“Gay. Say gay. Why deny it?”
“I didn’t deny it.”
“You didn’t say it.”
“I’m sorry. This is my fault, but we have lost track of the issue here. Which is why you are arguing for something you don’t want in the first place. To be a hero?”
“Let me give it a shot for you. I didn’t exactly want my neighbor moving in with me last April. But when his house burned down—which it did—why then, yes, we went and aired out the spare room.”
“For how long?”
“All morning.”
“Christ. Not how long did you air it out, how long did your neighbor stay there. A week?”
“It was damned close to a week!” Earl laughed. He upended his b
eer can and rattled it, to emphasize how it had gone empty on him.
“Not, say, eight years, though. Not a lifetime.”
“It is an example, Timmy. Of how your circumstances can change and how your response might have to change along with them.”
Tim slapped his left forearm with his right hand, then his right forearm with his left hand. A mosquito was invading his nose. The general hum was as dense as the wall of sound by a woodland pool on a spring night.
“You had best get yourself some long sleeves, bro.”
“I’m fine,” said Tim.
“They don’t care for me, the insects. Never have.”
Who could blame them, Tim thought. Yet the awful part of this was his awareness that Earl was being quote-unquote reasonable. Agreeable. Far more so than Tim.
“You’re lucky.”
“Maybe they just love that gay blood of yours. Which could unravel the mystery of AIDS—God’s way of controlling the skeeters.”
“You believe all gay men have AIDS. Is that right?”
“You tell me, Timmy. Do you, or donchoo?”
“Look, Earl. The law—”
“Timmy, Timmy. You don’t think that paperwork stands up once they know the truth. So why create a whole big mess? Why get a bunch of expensive liars involved, and waste a boatload of money?”
“I’m not the one mentioning lawyers. I’m all for keeping this thing simple.”
“Which is not what’s going to happen, once the liars get started with us.”
Earl always called lawyers liars. He was very doctrinaire about this, and quite certain it was, in every instance, highlarious. While Earl chortled to himself, Tim looked like a baseball coach giving out signs, hands flitting from ear to knee, swiping and slapping.
“Why don’t we start by finding out what the children think?” he said, struggling to concentrate, falling back on Ellie’s strategy. “Give them a voice in the matter.”
“Why don’t we. But in the meanwhile—”
“In the meanwhile, if you grab them you go to jail.”
“Jail? You have to lighten up, Timmy. Be yourself.”
“Jail,” said Tim, with a relish for the blunt-instrument simplicity of it.
“Tell you what. We all want what’s best for Bill and Cindy—”
“Hey, I’m impressed you remember their names.”
The Mt. Monadnock Blues Page 8
