Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  Elaine looked at him. Only once before had Denis used the word homosexual—the night he had come home from Yale and told them what they had long suspected. She and Neil had listened quietly and had assured him that night of their total acceptance, of their respect for his honesty, their unstinting support, and, when he had left, closing the door softly behind him, Neil had wept and she had sat immobile with her hands in her lap, fearful that if she moved her heart would shatter into tear-shaped shards of sorrow.

  But now, seated on the high mesa beneath a Ponderosa pine, she looked at her son and his chosen partner with a new perception, a clearer understanding. They had spoken, for the first time, the three of them, with a groping honesty, daring to disagree, daring to speak the truth. She puzzled over what had happened to alter the dynamic. Perhaps it was because she was alone and could focus entirely on Denis and Andrew. She no longer had to defer to Neil, gauge her words to his reactions. It was not a demand that Neil had ever made but rather one that she had thrust upon herself. And then again, it was possible that her conversations with her other children over the past several months had stripped the veneer from her own self-satisfied portrait of their family’s past and revealed truths she had not recognized. It did not matter. What truly mattered was that they had, the three of them, arrived at a new place, achieved a new understanding.

  She rested one hand on her son’s arm, the other on Andrew’s palm, drawing them closer to her so that, as the evening sun slowly faded, they sat together in a circlet of vanishing radiance.

  They spoke very little as they climbed down the overlook and they drove back to Santa Fe cocooned in a comfortable and companionable silence.

  Back at the house she worked for several hours in the studio, grateful to Andrew for so accurately lighting the drawing table. She drew a man and boy running down a shaded road—Neil and Denis—father and son—her sketch reflecting the fluidity of their movements, their shared grace. Her second drawing was of two young men holding hands and a man and woman, their own fingers intertwined, staring up at a star-spangled sky. Denis and Andrew, herself and Neil. It would be difficult to etch the stars onto the tile, she knew, but she would manage, perhaps using a microstylus. She had learned over these past months that she could manage many things.

  It was Denis’s suggestion that they spend a few days in Taos.

  “Andrew has a couple of photographs on exhibit at the Taos Institute of the Arts and we want to see how they’ve been mounted to get some idea of how to best position his work in our gallery,” he said over dinner after their return from Los Alamos.

  “Your gallery?” she asked in surprise.

  “Well, not ours exactly. Andrew and I formed a committee to raise money for a small clinic—an outpatient treatment center for AIDS victims and a walk-in for anyone without insurance. We added a small gallery which we hope will be a money-maker for the clinic. A percentage of anything sold will be invested for operating expenses. It’s taken us a while but we’ve got it up and we’re planning an official opening in a couple of weeks. Wine and cheese in the hospital lounge and an opening exhibit in the gallery. Andrew’s contributed some photographs and I’m hanging some pen and ink sketches—the first work like that I’ve done since high school.” He smiled ruefully. “Amateur stuff,” he added.

  “Damn good work,” Andrew protested.

  “I’m sure it is,” Elaine said. She had all but forgotten that Denis had shown a talent for life drawing, had even accompanied Sarah to studio classes, and then, inexplicably and abruptly, had abandoned all such efforts, not even bothering to take his drawing pens and chalks with him when he left for college.

  “Too busy,” he had said then.

  “Too frightened,” she realized now. Too intimidated by the nude models, too confused by his own yearnings.

  Her heart ached for all the pain her son had endured until he had the courage to reveal the essence of his being to others and lay claim to his own life. Why had she not recognized the conflict that raged within him? And why had Neil, the trained psychoanalyst, been blind to his own son’s agony? A brief irrational anger swept over her and swiftly subsided into a quiet abiding sorrow. She and Neil had not seen what they did not want to see. The answer was that simple.

  “Where is this clinic?” she asked.

  “Actually not far from here. A short walk along the mountain trail. Do you want to see it?”

  She nodded.

  They walked then along the narrow trail, shaded by aspens and cottonwood trees, Andrew and Denis clasping each other’s hands, their footfalls silent upon the soft leaf-strewn earth. The clinic was a small white building, its straight lines and flat roof not unlike those of pueblo dwellings. The domed wide-windowed gallery was artfully constructed of tierra blanca adobe, the natural white adobe mud, across which evening shadows danced but which would take on an alabaster glow in the pale light of dawn.

  “It’s a lovely building,” she said. “You should be proud.”

  “Phil’s design. He’s a good friend of ours, whose partner, Mel, died of AIDS. He really got the project going,” Andrew said. “He arranged for a lot of the funding. Mel had a hard time getting treatment at the municipal hospitals and Phil didn’t want that to happen to anyone else. And neither do we.”

  “I’d like to meet Phil,” Elaine murmured. “He sounds like a remarkable man.”

  “You will. When we get back from Taos. He’s a regular at Friday night services.”

  “Friday night services?” She did not mask the surprise in her voice.

  “You’ll see,” Denis said and flashed her the grin that had charmed her all the days of his boyhood. “Hey, Mom, you didn’t think I’d forgotten my bar mitzvah, did you?”

  He laughed and Andrew chortled. Elaine, too, laughed and their mingled chorus of spontaneous jollity echoed down the tree-lined mountain trail.

  On impulse she called Herb Glasser that evening, remembering that Peter and Lauren had taken the children skiing and he would be alone. She smiled to hear the pleasure in his voice and breathlessly, she told him about Andrew and Denis, about their trip to Los Alamos, their planned visit to Taos and about the snow-white clinic that stood alone on a mountain trail.

  “New Mexico sounds wonderful. And it’s not very far from Los Angeles,” he said.

  She heard the longing in his voice and understood that he was waiting for an invitation to join her or perhaps he thought that she might tell him that she planned to return to California. She remained silent, staring at herself in the mirror opposite the phone, pulling her fingers through the thick tangle of dark curls increasingly threaded with silver, practicing a smile that he could not see.

  “I want you to be happy, Elaine,” he said at last.

  “I know.”

  How kind he was, this lonely man who was grandfather to her own grandchildren. She had been wrong to call him, wrong to incite a false and selfish intimacy. She acknowledged that she had wanted to hear his exclamation of delight when he heard her voice, the delight that reassured her that she was still a desirable woman, that her sensuality had survived Neil’s death. She wondered if she was being unfaithful to Neil and smiled bitterly at the thought. Infidelity was the province of the living and Neil, her wonderful, beloved Neil, was dead.

  “Good night, Herb,” she said softly.

  “Good night, Elaine.”

  She went out to the patio of the guesthouse and stared out at the bedroom that her son and Andrew shared. A small bedside lamp beamed through their wide window. She imagined them lying side by side in that room, painted a shade of blue that Andrew had told her was considered the color of good fortune in Jamaica. She was suffused with gratitude that they had found each other, that they were not alone. All her children then had reached safe harbors of love and intimacy. Perhaps, she and Neil had been skillful navigators after all.

  “Neil.”

  Weighted by memory and desire, she spoke his name into the velvet darkness.

  They set out
for Taos early in the morning and made the drive northward as the sun slowly, almost reluctantly it seemed to her, rose in the cloudless cerulean sky. Elaine had heard of the beauty of Taos but she was unprepared for the sheer majesty of its aspect as they ascended through the Rio Grande Canyon rimmed by huge igneous rock cliffs on to the plateau. The sudden clarity of light seemed to purify and illuminate the colors of earth and sky and every leaf quivered with a vibrant verdancy. There was a sweet quietude, as though the peaceful small villages had succumbed to an enchanted sleep, sheltered by the tall blue mountains that shielded them from the turmoil of the modern world.

  Denis stopped the car and Andrew took his camera and shot the panoramic view from several angles, now crouching, now mounting a small promontory, aiming his lens westward and then eastward.

  “I must have tried to capture this view dozens of times,” he said as he got back into the car. “But I just can’t get it. I know what I want but it escapes me.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she said, thinking of all the drawings she had discarded, of all the graceful shapes she had visualized in her mind’s eye that had remained unrealized in the clay beneath her hands. Neil had spoken of a patient, a poet, who had complained that words whirled through his mind in delicate sequence but fled, like butterflies in flight, when he touched pen to paper.

  “I think my mother understands you better than I do, Andrew,” Denis said laughingly.

  “That’s good,” Andrew responded. “It’s time that I had a mother who understood me.”

  Elaine glanced at him. Andrew seldom spoke of his childhood, of the parents and siblings he had left behind in Ochos Rios, although she knew that he sent them money on a regular basis and he and Denis visited them each year during their vacations at the house Gordon Cummings had left him. Those visits, Denis had complained, were often awkward, laced with sudden silences.

  “They don’t understand him,” Denis had said bitterly. “He lives in a different world.”

  “Of course he does.”

  Andrew was received deferentially in galleries throughout the States and Europe, he moved easily, indifferently among the famous and the affluent while his family remained mired in the poverty of the small Jamaican town, struggling against heat and hurricane. They were island dwellers who did not dream of what lay beyond their sea.

  She had not added that children, inevitably, live in a world different from the one their parents had known. It had taken her long enough to understand that each generation, in turn, traveled through different emotional terrains, settled in alien landscapes, in distant states, in distant lands. The life she and Neil built in Westchester was at a far remove from Yaroslavl, where Neil had been born and the small Polish village from which her own parents had emigrated. Their comfortable suburban world bore no resemblance to the immigrant struggles of their parents. Her children’s choices, their opportunities to make such choices, were at a variance with anything that either she or Neil had known. Neither Andrew, nor her sons and daughters, had abandoned their families. They had simply veered off in different directions, each of them choosing a road less traveled. The poet’s words came flooding back in memory. And that has made all the difference. All the difference to them and now, at this turning point, all the difference to her.

  She smiled and concentrated on the Taos scene as they passed through the Plaza and down the winding lanes lined with traditional adobe homes. They arrived at the bed-and-breakfast Denis and Andrew favored, which was, in fact, a small colony of charming casitas, run by Lily and Sean, a smiling rotund Irish couple who exuberantly embraced their guests.

  “You’re going to love Taos,” Lily promised as she showed Elaine to her casita.

  “I love it already,” Elaine said, looking around her room with its kiva fireplace and knotty pine-paneled walls, the bed covered with a spread of Navajo weave. The Mexican tiles on the floor were bright islands of color. She took note of the various shades. She wondered if she could duplicate the Aztec red and the sapphire blue in a glaze for the small section of her mural that she hoped would capture the ambience of New Mexico.

  She stood at the large window that faced the Taos mountains and overlooked the garden which was a riot of varicolored tulips and pansies, interspersed with gentle blue blossoms of flax. She smiled to see the hummingbirds that flitted through the chamisa bushes, briefly perching on a fragile branch before flying off to yet another arm of greenery.

  All tension left her, all sadness, for the moment, was assimilated. She had arrived at a place of healing, an annealing landscape. She could see herself working for long periods in this peaceful artists’ town, now looking up at the majestic peaks of the Rocky Mountains, now looking down at the deep incline of the Rio Grande Gorge. She understood that Denis had an ulterior motive in taking her on this journey to Taos. He had wanted her to be inspired by this radiant vista, to lay claim to its dramatic colors and the wondrous shapes of its cliffs and mountains, its plateaus and vales. He was, in fact, extending an invitation of a kind, reminding her that her options were not limited, that she might find a creative home in a landscape of such rare and urgent beauty.

  They spent the rest of that day at Taos Pueblo and she stared in wonderment at the two large buildings, rooms shaped of adobe mud and artfully piled one atop the other, in a pyramid of cubicles that assumed the shape of the Taos Mountain toward the northeast. It startled Denis that the one hundred residents of the Indian community managed without running water or electricity. Andrew, however, was unmoved.

  “I grew up in a house without running water and electricity,” he said dismissively. “And my parents have only had it for the past five years.”

  “My parents also grew up without running water and electricity. My mother often told me how frightened she was when she first heard a toilet flush,” Elaine recalled.

  “We have that much in common.” Andrew flashed her a grin and she smiled back.

  “Oh, we have much more than that in common,” she assured him as Denis, walking between them, linked arms with them and nodded.

  “Of course you do,” he agreed. “You’re both artists and you both love me.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Andrew teased and ran off, with Denis in playful pursuit.

  A group of Indians watched the two dark-haired young men race downhill through ribs of sunlight. At the bottom of the hill, their snow-white Tshirts sweat-drenched, their faces damp, they embraced and laughed up at Elaine. She looked hard at them and closed her eyes as though she would commit to memory that burnished moment of their shared happiness.

  As their days in Taos passed, her feelings for the town intensified. She wakened early and relished eating a solitary breakfast on the Plaza while she watched the town slowly come to life. Shops were opened, galleries were unshuttered, delivery vans moved slowly down the winding roads. She looked up at the morning sky and inhaled the scent of the dry sweet air. It surprised her that eating alone no longer saddened her, that solitude had ceased to be painful.

  They spent a day driving the enchanted circle, through Red River, Eagle Nest and Angel Fire, charmed by the old Hispanic villages of Arroyo Honda and Questa, stunned by the beauty of Moreno Valley and the surrounding majestic mountain peaks. It was clear to her that her son and Andrew loved this expansive landscape because it was here that the glory of nature triumphed over trivial human aspirations and prejudices.

  She went with them to the Art Museum where a small exhibit of Andrew’s photographs had been mounted. She marveled at the tenderness with which he had photographed the barefoot Indian children of Taos Pueblo.

  “He really caught them, didn’t he?” the sad-looking gaunt man standing beside her said as she studied a collage of portraits, the lined and wrinkled faces of the older Indians a stark contrast to the bright eyes and smooth skins of the children. Andrew’s camera had captured the impact of the passing years on youth and innocence, the assault of life on face and figure.

  “They are,” she ag
reed, “sad and wonderful.” As she spoke Andrew and Denis approached.

  “Phil, we didn’t know you were in Taos,” Andrew said excitedly, draping his arm over the man’s shoulder. “I see you’ve already met Denis’s mother, or have you? In any case Phil London, this is Elaine Gordon. Denis and I wanted her to see Taos. Can you have dinner with us? We can talk about the exhibits for the opening of the gallery.”

  “Sorry. I just came up for a couple of hours to deliver some new paintings to the gallery. It’s the first time I’ve been out of the city since Mel…” Phil London’s face twisted in a paroxysm of sudden grief and his voice trailed off.

  Elaine felt a surge of sympathy. She recognized the symptoms of raw sorrow, the devastation of a loss not yet assimilated.

  “I have to get back to my studio,” he continued, struggling for composure. “You guys decide on your own about the exhibit. I appreciate it, I really do. And I saw your drawings, Denis. They’re good, really good. You should think about giving up the law.”

  Denis shrugged.

  “I don’t think that’s a real option,” he said. “But thanks. We’ll see you at services Friday night?”

  “I hope so. It was good to meet you, Elaine.”

  He held his hand out to her, his paint-scarred fingers thin as stalks, blue veins rising from the translucent pallor of his slender wrists.

  Her heart called out to him.

  I know, she wanted to say. I know what it is to lose a lover. I know what it is to watch a life ended, to walk alone through empty rooms. But it will get better, the sadness will lift. Her own sadness was slowly dissipating. Slowly, very slowly, she was restored to herself.

  She said nothing and watched him disappear through the shadowed archway into the glaring sunlight.

  Only then did she turn inquiringly to Denis.

  “He’s a wonderful painter,” he said. “And a wonderful man. His partner Mel Abrams, who was a sculptor, died a couple of months ago. He was a good friend of ours and the gallery at the clinic is dedicated to Mel. Phil is just lost without him. I can understand that.”