Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  She did not reply but poured him a glass of wine. He held it in his hand as he wandered through the large room, his eyes resting now on the paintings, now on the books and finally on the framed family photographs that lined the mantel. He stood before the wedding portrait of Sarah and Moshe in Jerusalem, of Peter and Lauren in California, the enlargement of the black-and-white snapshot Elaine had taken of Lisa and David in Moscow outside the Choral Synagogue minutes after their marriage. Austere mahogany frames encased the sepia wedding photographs of his two sets of grandparents, transported across the ocean, removed from their cluttered inner-city apartments to this place of pride in Westchester. He stared at his own face on the day of his graduation from law school. Andrew had taken that picture, developed and framed it and presented it to Elaine and Neil along with a photograph of Denis and himself laughing, their heads turned skyward, their arms about each other’s waists. Elaine had never placed the photograph of Andrew and himself on the mantel and the omission pained him. It gave the lie to his parents’ oft-repeated claims that they were comfortable with his homosexuality, that they accepted Andrew as they had accepted their other in-law children.

  He understood that they had long been ambivalent about his orientation. That ambivalence explained the swiftness of their visits, the odd uneasy silences that had overtaken them as they sat together at the dinner table, he and Andrew, his mother and father, searching desperately for a topic that would affirm the normalcy of a shared family meal that, in their eyes, was hardly normal. He had once heard his mother speak of Andrew on the phone to her friend, Serena.

  “He’s a very attractive, very talented young man of color,” she had said and the control in her voice had angered Denis. He wanted his mother to see Andrew as he himself saw him, as the caring, insightful, tenderhearted man whom he loved. An “attractive, talented young man of color” was an abstraction, a dismissal of a kind of Andrew, the full-blooded sensitive man who wakened beside him each morning.

  Elaine watched her youngest son, her baby, the child whose vulnerability had always touched her heart, over whom she had worried during long sleepless nights, study the family photographs. She saw the sadness on his face and went to stand beside him.

  “Of course I’ll come to New Mexico,” she said. “It will be good for the two of us to have some time together.”

  “The three of us,” he corrected. He would not allow Andrew to be excluded.

  “Of course. The three of us.” She blushed, aware of her blunder. “I had always intended to do just that,” she continued. “I just want to finish working on the tiles I designed in Russia. When I’ve fired them and set them in place on the mural I’ll book my tickets.”

  “Look, bring your stuff with you—your etching tools, your brushes, your pads and drawing pencils. You can work in Andrew’s studio and we have a couple of friends with kilns.”

  “We’ll see,” she said evasively. “Do you want to see the mural? It’s still a work in progress but I’d like to know what you think.” Her own suggestion surprised her. She seldom showed her unfinished work to anyone.

  “No,” he replied firmly. “I want to be surprised.”

  She nodded, although she did not understand his reluctance.

  Lisa, David and Genia visited the next day and Denis immediately fell in love with his niece. He crawled across the carpet on all fours with a giggling Genia perched on his back, hoisted her onto his shoulders and dashed through the garden with her, now and again lowering his head so that she might pluck leaves from low-hanging branches.

  “He’s wonderful with her,” Lisa said, watching her brother.

  “He’s always been wonderful with children,” Elaine agreed. “That’s why it’s so painful that…” Her voice trailed off as she remembered Neil’s words the night Denis had told them that he was gay.

  No little Denises, he had said, as he and Elaine sat in the gathering darkness, shivering in their sadness although the early evening air was unseasonably warm.

  “Mom, he’s happy. He and Andrew are great together,” Lisa said. “That’s what important. He’s happy.”

  “Yes. Of course,” she agreed as he loped toward them, Genia happily threading her harvest of young green leaves through his curling dark hair.

  And Denis did look happy as he met her plane at the Albuquerque airport two weeks later and hurried toward her, relieving her of the paint-encrusted wooden work kit she clutched too tightly.

  “So you decided to bring your tools with you after all,” he said excitedly. “That’s great. Andrew set up a drafting table for you in the guesthouse. You’ll have total privacy whenever you want it.”

  Elaine smiled up at her son. His gray eyes were mica-bright and the pallor she had noticed during his visit to New York was gone. There was a ruddy glow to his skin, gained he told her, during a hike deep into the desert that he and Andrew had taken over the weekend. He lifted her suitcases with muscular grace and tossed them into the trunk of his car. He had come to the airport straight from the courtroom and he loosened the collar of his white shirt, removed his tie and jacket and rolled his sleeves up, impatient to feel the touch of sunlight on his arms. She marveled at how at ease he was in this landscape, at how comfortable he seemed to be in his own skin. He was at home in this territory, beneath the cloudless skies saturated with golden sunlight. He and Andrew had found each other during a cold New Haven winter but they had found the life that they both loved in the desert city surrounded by snow-covered mountain peaks, a city that offered them both privacy and an accepting community.

  As they drove north to Santa Fe, following the Turquoise Trail, Denis pointed out the delicate blossoms that had begun to sprout on the cactus plants that lined the road, advised her to look westward so that she might see the gentle rise of Cochiti Pueblo. The air grew fragrant with the scent of piñon smoke and he smiled.

  “Now you know we’re getting close to Santa Fe,” he said. “We’re a city of fireplaces. Andrew and I have planted a windbreak of piñons. We have a fire in the living room every night and fuel it with the pine nuts. Music, wine and a low-burning fire in the hearth—nothing like it.”

  “I know,” she said sadly and he remembered, too late, that that, after all, had been the pattern of all the winters of his parents’ marriage—wine, music and the low-burning flames that they watched each winter evening, seated in their armchairs, their books open on their laps, cocooned in the firelight, cradled in their love.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he murmured, cursing himself for his thoughtlessness in evoking memories that were surely painful to her.

  “Don’t be. I’m glad, Denis, that you and Andrew have what we had—your father and I.”

  He reached out and touched her hand lightly, grateful that she recognized that what he and Andrew felt for each other was not unlike the loving tenderness she and his father had known.

  They drove through the city and he concentrated on maneuvering the car through the ancient narrow streets, past the brown adobe houses whose patios were rimmed with swaying hollyhocks. Towering cottonwood trees cast patches of shade across multicolored slabs of slate. Stalled in traffic outside the Fonda Hotel, Denis waved and smiled at a man who called his name, at a woman who waved to him. A toothless old Navajo hurried up to the car, his dark sun-wrinkled face wreathed in a smile, his wife trailing behind him.

  “Señor Gordon, we thank you for what you did for us.”

  “Nada,” Denis said. “Nothing. I was glad to help.”

  “For us it was everything,” the old man said.

  His wife came forward and offered him a garland of red chili peppers and a bouquet of sunflowers which Denis passed to Elaine.

  “Mia madre,” he said. “My mother. Gracias.”

  “You must be proud, Señora, to have such a good man for a son,” the aged woman said.

  “I am,” Elaine agreed as the traffic eased and Denis moved the car forward.

  “What was that about?” she asked.

  “A l
and dispute. Some developer wanted to evict his family and others from his tribe from the home they’ve lived in for years and I went to court pro bono and got them a restraining order. It was nothing.” He honked his horn lightly to warn a group of schoolchildren to hurry across the road.

  “Apparently to them it was everything,” Elaine said and thought, for a fleeting irrational moment, that she must tell Neil about their son’s kindness. The car lurched forward and she was catapulted back into reality. Neil is dead, she told herself severely and buried her head in the bouquet of sunflowers so that Denis would not see the tears that burned her eyes.

  They left the city limits and drove eastward toward the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the gentle incline where Denis and Andrew had built their pueblo-style adobe home amid a grove of aspen and cottonwood trees. Andrew, wearing a collarless white shirt and soft white slacks, waited for them on the flagstone patio and Elaine was moved as always by the sheer beauty of his finely chiseled features and the golden hue of his skin. It surprised her that for the first time she felt no discomfort as her son kissed his partner and when Andrew turned to her she held her hand out and, almost instinctively, he pressed it to his cheek.

  “Welcome to our home, Elaine,” he said and took the chili garland and sunflowers from her as Denis carried her suitcase into the guesthouse.

  They had dinner that night in the spacious dining room, its walls pearl-finished, its hardwood floors covered with brightly colored Navajo rugs, the ceiling beamed with vigas and latillas and a gentle fire burning in the kiva fireplace. Over the grilled corn tortilla and lime soup, which Andrew had prepared, Denis discussed their plans for the early part of her visit. Both he and Andrew had taken several days off so that they could take short day trips with her.

  “You never really saw New Mexico,” Denis said. “Before.”

  The word hung heavily between them. Before. Before death changed our lives. Before you were alone, before when you were as uneasy with us as we were with you. Before.

  He looked down but Elaine nodded.

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “I never really saw New Mexico. Your father’s patient schedule was so demanding that we could never stay long enough.”

  “Of course,” Andrew said smoothly. He knew the truth but he accepted her excuse with grace.

  They decided then that they would drive to Los Alamos the next day. And because the journey west had exhausted her, Denis took her to her room in the guesthouse. She was touched to see that like Lisa and Peter, Denis had placed ceramics of her own design in the room, objects she had created to mark his passage to new experiences. There were the earth-colored bookends she had made him when he went away to college, the deep aqua bowl in which he had kept fruit during his years at law school. It occurred to her that although she had brought each of her other children a gift of her own design when they bought their own homes, she had never crafted a gift for this house that Denis and Andrew had built together. It was an omission that shamed her even as she kissed her son good-night.

  twenty-three

  They drove west to Los Alamos the next morning, turning at the Pojoaque junction to reach the small town spread over the rainbow-hued narrow mesas of the Pajarito Plateau. Elaine reached for her sketchbook and her colored pencils, trying to capture the varied desert colors, the rise of the Jemez mountains and the graceful incline of the Rio Grande valley. She pondered how she could translate the different subtle pastel tones into defining glazes. As they approached the city she stared out at the charred earth and the skeletal trees, lonely survivors amidst the blackened stumps and parched shrubbery that had once covered a forest floor.

  “What happened here?” she asked.

  “A forest fire back in 2000,” Andrew replied. “They evacuated the town and acres and acres burned. Nature getting its own back, some said, providing its own destruction. The Indians thought it was some sort of retribution for the Manhattan Project research and the explosion of that first atomic bomb in their desert. They reasoned that the gods must have been angry to see that blinding cloud of light covering their peaceful plateau so they sent their own arrows of fire to remind the crazy gringo scientists of their power. I’m not an Indian but it sounds plausible enough to me.”

  Elaine wondered at the bitterness in his voice. Denis, who was driving, took one hand off the wheel and reached over to touch his partner’s arm, a gesture of comfort for a pain she did not understand.

  They stopped briefly at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and then continued on to the Bradbury Science Museum. Elaine stood between the two young men as they wandered from display to display, pausing to read the letter Albert Einstein had written in 1939 to President Roosevelt advocating research into uranium which could possibly become a useful source of energy.

  “Just think of how the course of history might have been different if Hitler had not been so intent on exterminating Jews,” she said. “Einstein would have remained in Austria and Germany might have developed the atomic bomb before we did.”

  “We?” Andrew asked dryly.

  “The Allies. The United States,” she replied, mystified by the sudden anger of his tone.

  They walked on, passing through the Defense Gallery, staring at the 5-ton Little Boy bomb replicating the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Elaine shivered.

  “I remember when the war ended,” she said. “Both endings. VE Day, VJ Day. Victory over Europe. Victory over Japan.”

  She had been a small girl, bewildered by her parents’ tears on VE Day, their joy on VJ Day. She had danced with them on the broad Brooklyn street, blocked off for the celebration, beer flowing, trays piled high with food, a neighborhood band playing and American flags waved by laughing children. The war was over, the fighting and the killing done with. There would be no more gold stars hanging in curtained windows, hearts would not sink at the sight of a Western Union messenger ringing a doorbell. The concentration camps had been liberated, the memorial candles for the nameless dead had flickered out. Neil had told her how his mother had fainted on VE Day, how his father had spent hours on the phone talking to representatives of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, spelling the name of his town over and over. “Yaroslavl. Y A R O S L A V L. Did any Jews from Yaroslavl survive the war?” Holding Genia in her arms she had learned the answer to his question decades later, from the sweet-faced elderly monk who had so sadly said, “There are no more Jews in Yaroslavl.”

  They left Los Alamos and drove to the nearby White Rock Overlook in Bandalier where they shared the picnic lunch Denis had packed, looking down at the wondrous panorama of the river valley, undulating its way toward Santa Fe.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” she said, lifting her face toward the sun.

  “Yes. It’s a relief to get away from Los Alamos, from everything it stands for,” Andrew replied, tossing a crust of bread to a chipmunk who scurried by.

  “You mean the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb?” Elaine asked.

  “The Hiroshima bomb. The Nagasaki bomb. The ongoing development of nuclear weapons,” he said.

  “You don’t believe that we should have dropped the bomb?” she asked.

  “I wish it had never happened.”

  “But it brought the war to an end. If the bomb had not been dropped hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers would have died,” she protested but even as she spoke, she reminded herself that Denis and Andrew had been born decades after World War II. The war had not impacted on their lives. For them, those terrible years were a historical abstraction. The morality of the A-bomb decision was a question to be debated in cafés and dorm rooms, in seminars and auditoriums. They had the luxury of hindsight, of cool analysis and cooler judgment while her generation had lived in the very cauldron of terror.

  “Why wasn’t it dropped on Europe?” Andrew asked.

  The question startled her.

  “What Andrew means,” Denis said slowly, “is that the bomb was dropped on Japan because there were fewer qualms about a genocide a
gainst people of color.”

  “You can understand why that would anger me,” Andrew said. “Considering my own ethnicity.”

  “I can understand that,” she said, struggling to offer him an answer that would satisfy. “There was, of course, a great deal of discussion of that during my own university days. I think the general agreement was that the war in Europe had ended before the Manhattan Project detonated its first bomb in this very desert. I don’t think that the skin color of the people of Hiroshima contributed to the decision to drop the bomb. And, with all due respect, Andrew, I don’t think it was genocide. Jews of my generation understand exactly what genocide was.”

  Again she heard the monk’s sorrowful voice.

  “There are no more Jews in Yaroslavl.” Nor were there any more Jews in the Polish villages where her own parents had been born or in the cities of Germany and the small towns of Hungary and Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia that had once been home to Sarah’s Jerusalem neighbors.

  “All right. Genocide is the wrong word,” Andrew said. “But don’t you agree that skin color must have played some role in the decision, that people of color, Asians, African-Americans, Caribes like myself, were a more comfortable choice for the powers that be?”

  She hesitated and as she carefully weighed her words, Denis spoke, his tone, like Neil’s, calm and thoughtful. Like his father he was a cautious dispenser of hard-earned insights.

  “If Andrew and I were living in Hitler’s Europe we would be doubly vulnerable. He because of his skin color, I because of my religion and both of us because of our homosexuality.”

  He put his arm about his partner’s shoulder and pulled him close as though to protect him from the very vulnerability of which he spoke. This too they shared, these two sensitive and handsome young men, bonded by love, shadowed by fear.