Consenting Adult (17 page)

Dr. Dudley’s refusal to see her tipped some scale, for the next morning she telephoned Mark Waldo for an appointment. She had not been in his office since that day last fall—only last fall, only eight or nine months back, not a dozen years?—and when she faced him across his desk, she said, “You know why I’m here, Mark.”

“I imagine I do. Is there any change?”

“I don’t know. Ken doesn’t know. The deal apparently is that parents get no report, no prognosis, not even a year later, with a second year coming up.” She told of Dr. Dudley’s refusal to see her and then, rapidly, with a conscious attempt to be fair, summarized their family life for the past months. “And now Ken won’t be at Jeff’s graduation. It isn’t as if he’s tough about it inside—he is in hell about that, about all of it. So am I. It’s worst of all for Jeff, but he
is
getting help, whatever help is possible. Maybe Ken ought to start with an analyst too. Maybe I ought to.”

“Don’t say that with such a jeer, Tessa. In many families with continuing problems—alcoholism, for example—the other members of the family are as hard-pressed as the officially afflicted one.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “You’ve lost weight.”

“Have I ever. Look.” She pushed up a few inches from the chair and looked down at the thin flat line of her body under the slight curve of her breasts, her stomach almost concave, as thin and flat as that of a girl who hadn’t quite reached puberty. “I used to think it would be lovely to lose ten pounds.”

“But primarily you’re here because of Ken, aren’t you?”

“He’s killing himself, Mark. The incessant tension, bottling everything up, never letting anything out. I almost wish he had a horrible temper, like me or Jeff. How would it help him, or me or Jeff or anybody, if he works himself into another stroke?”

“Perhaps I ought to ask him to come in early for his checkup.”

She seemed not to hear. “But what terrifies me even more is the summer, with Jeff right there, all of us right there every day. It will destroy us, I just know it.”

“Could Jeff get a job out of town this year?”

“He’s already got his old job back, the one he had last year, at Paperbound Books. He loved it and did so well at it. Anyway, wouldn’t he feel exiled or banished if I suggested any such thing? There’s no fooling Jeff; he’s too bright. He instantly saw why Ken had delayed his trip West.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you fool Jeff.”

“Did I sound as if I were jeering again? I’m too tense too. I lose my temper, I cry. I suppose I’m wrong to reject the idea of an analyst for me or Ken, but he would never agree, and me, I just can’t think of Jeff stretched out on one couch and Ken on another in another doctor’s office and me on still another in a third doctor’s office.” She reached for her handkerchief and dried her eyes in a furious swipe. “I get weeping at the least thing.”

He reached for his prescription pad and began to write. “This is for you, and this is for Ken’s Librium, if he runs out. I’ll phone him and ask him to come in.”

“Mark, don’t let him know how much I’ve told you. Before, I never worried about what you told Ken, but we’ve been changing so, since all this began.” She hesitated. “You know about our other problems, well, they are about over, I imagine. Neither of us ever can think of our own sex life any more.”

He nodded, without speaking. Then he opened the door to his examination room and said, “Let’s have a look at your pulse rate and blood pressure. That’s easier to measure.”

When the sixth of June finally arrived, she did not drive up to Placquette alone. About a week before, she had told Margie and Nate that she would be going up by herself because of “Dad’s trip West,” and Margie had flared into an irritated attention.

“Whatever the hell kind of row Dad has going with Jeff, I do think he might skip it for the kid’s Graduation Day.”

“Let’s us skip it too.” She sounded depressed; she could hear it herself.

“It gets me sick and you can tell Dad I said so.”

“It’s complex, dear. I’ve been wanting to talk about it to you and Nate, but as yet I can’t.”

“Complex? What
is
it?” She waited for a moment, and saw the unwillingness in her mother’s face. “Okay, then I’ll just get hold of our baby-sitter and drive up there with you.” She almost flung this offer at Tessa, but she could see her mood lighten.

“Good idea, Margie,” Nate said.

“I wonder if Don could take the day off and come too.
That
would really show Dad.”

“Don, the true-blue employee?” Nate put in with a grin.

“You lay off Don,” Margie said. “So he’s as square as a box, like a few other people we know. Right in this family.”

“You must mean me,” Nate said.

She laughed suddenly. “Nate Jacobs, Esquare!”

They started early, Tessa shifting away from the wheel as Margie appeared from her front door, in the unwritten law that driving was the prerogative of the young. It cheered her to have Margie going up with her, even though Margie’s motive was mainly to punish her father. It was a day that told of deep summer, the sun more insistent than it should be in the first week of June, the sky adrift with strands and streamers of thin cloud, the banks of flowering bushes rising alongside the parkway giving off the ingratiating odor of new-mown grass and clover. The drive up went quickly, and Jeff met them with open astonishment at his sister’s appearance. “Look who came up to see me get graduated,” he shouted, and gave her a hug. “Great, just great.” Then he turned to his mother, happy and still noisy. “Hi, Mama, at last the big day, hey? I’m a college man.”

“No Placque any more,” Margie said, and they both laughed at this ancient joke once made by their dentist. “Any pangs about leaving the dear old place?”

“I can’t wait to get out Hey, maybe I could stow my bags and stuff in the car before we get started.” He glanced at his watch. “Nope, I better get you to the auditorium.”

It’s like the way you feel at weddings, Tessa thought as the ceremonies got under way. There’s something so eternally touching about them, when they’re starting forth on a new segment of life. They look so confident and yet so tentative. Nobody could look more sure, more certain than these young men. Including Jeff.

She looked at the others, surrounding him on the platform. All kinds of faces were there, handsome, plain, strong, weak, all kinds of bodies, tall, short, muscular, delicate, plump, lean, all kinds of eyes, noses, hair, hands, and all young, all at the beginning.

Suddenly a thread of envy wound itself through her mind, cutting in its sharpness. None of them faced what her son faced; none of them carried the problem he carried; none of the proud parents all around her in the auditorium knew the problem she and Ken knew.

Equally suddenly she thought, Maybe some of them do. Maybe half a dozen of these proud parents share exactly the same problem, maybe more than half a dozen. According to Kinsey they do. She looked around her at the other parents, and then she looked up again at the platform and at the boys there, studying them one by one. But this was a mockery of everything she knew; she stopped herself. There was no special way a homosexual had to look; there need be no distinguishing characteristics. There were none in Jeff. She thought of John Lanner, one of their editors at Q. and P., a bachelor of about forty who lived with a young man in his twenties. Office talk said they were homosexuals. She had never met the young man, but she saw John Lanner every day and until these last months she had never paused to consider whether he was a homosexual or not.

Why couldn’t you be as casual about your own son? Ken, if he were to meet Lanner, would be courteous and unconcerned about the homosexual gossip, would be friendly, might even like him. Ken, after all, was a civilized man. Yet with his own son—

Forget Ken, she thought stormily, you can’t be casual either. Sure, you can be about John Lanner, because you don’t care whether his life is ruined or not, and because your life can’t be ruined with it. But with Jeff you do care, so you’re a whole other person. It’s a paradox, a crazy anomaly of love.

Up on the platform they were beginning the last formality, the handing out of diplomas, and she watched each boy step forward as his name was called. This thin owlish boy would probably be a teacher, the next a customers’ man in Wall Street, this one a scientist … the game went on in her mind until Jeff strode forward, to a heightened applause from the audience. That was because of football and baseball, of course, but her heart lifted to the amplified sound. He was so fine-looking, so strong, so intelligent, youth at the threshold of life, and she loved him beyond the limits of all problems.

She kept waiting for Ken to finish his trip. Next week he’ll be home, she would think, in three days Ken will be here, tomorrow he’ll get back, and finally, as she awoke on Saturday the seventeenth, this afternoon they’ll face each other.

At five there was Ken’s short double tap at the bell, his key in the lock, their greeting. He looked thinner, very tired, and she thought, as she rarely did, of his age. He used to look so much younger than he was; even after the stroke, with full recovery, a good deal younger. In the past months he had again begun to look all of his fifty-five years, and tonight, just after the nonstop flight back from the Coast, he looked more. Next month he would be fifty-six. He looked old.

“Want to fix me a drink?” he said.

“The ice is out. It’ll only take a minute.” She reached out her hand to his arm. “Sit down, Ken, just take it easy. Those glamorous airline commercials never mention the drag of waiting around airports, getting your luggage, finding a taxi and getting just plain bushed.”

“I do feel bushed. It was a tough trip this time, everybody kicking about high costs and bloody hot everywhere.” He glanced at the air conditioner behind him. “I’m glad we got the biggest one. That feels good.”

“I’m glad you’re home, Ken. I got edgy about you.” This was true enough. Once the exceptional hours of Jeff’s commencement were over, the sense of occasion disappeared under the onrush of routine living. On the past Monday, Jeff had started in again as mailboy-office boy at Paperbound and she turned to her own work with renewed energy, trying to ignore that imaginary ticking off of time, that shortening fuse burning backward to her hidden and waiting bomb.

There had been only one ugliness with Jeff, and technically, she herself had brought it on, for she had told him of her note to Dr. Dudley and of his curt reply, “Better not.”

“My God, you ought to know by now he’d say that.”

She could see muscles of his jaw go rigid, saw his fists clench.

“I’m telling you only because I wouldn’t want you thinking I wrote him behind your back and—”

“He doesn’t
believe
in reporting on patients,” Jeff interrupted. “No decent analyst does. His patient has to know for sure that he won’t go tattling to his Mama and Papa.”

“Not the scornful tone, please. I wasn’t asking him to tattle. Dr. Dudley knew that, if you don’t.”

“You keep digging and digging just the same.”

“Now, look here—”

“Christ, damn it, I won’t look here.” He had started for the door, stopped, and shouted, “If you don’t want me with Dr. Dudley, just stop the whole damn thing. I told you, I’m not going to get down on my knees and beg you to keep on.”

“Oh, Jeff, can’t you see
any
of this from my point of view as well as your own?”

“Your point of view! You’ll be talking about your unhappiness next.”

This time he left the room; a moment later, the apartment. She stared at the closing door. He was dividing into two people, one the old Jeff, the other solely involved with being a homosexual or not being a homosexual, hostile, attacking, especially his parents.

There are so many by-products, she had thought in a new despondency. It’s not just the homosexuality, it’s what it does to him and to all of us in fifty different ways, as if one poison engendered fifty other poisons, fifty side effects that are more lethal than the poison itself.

Now with Ken sipping his drink, abstaining from what would have been the simple, obvious question, she said, “He’s out. He’ll be back for dinner.” Ken nodded. “They’re giving him sixty-eight dollars at Paperbound this time.”

“Good.”

“Nate’s just had a raise too. He’s doing awfully well.”

“He’s a bright boy, Nate, and a good writer.”

“He and Margie are going on that Peace March to Washington, and the baby is going too.”

He actually smiled. Just then Jeff arrived, a little early. They heard him in the hall and looked at each other. Ken seemed to sit up straighter, pressing against the back of his chair. Tessa asked something with her eyes, asked a favor, help, a kindness.

“Hi,” Jeff addressed the room.

“Hello, dear.”

“I hear you’re back at Paperbound,” Ken said. “They’re having the biggest year ever, the biggest list.”

“So I gather,” Jeff said. “Hardcovers have priced themselves right out of the market”

“Considering the skyrocketing costs of paper, shipping, labor, you’d have to charge the same amount.”

They sound like two publishers talking shop, Tessa thought in relief. Maybe they’ll keep it this impersonal and we’ll all get by.

The impersonal fled during dinner. It was Jeff who first mentioned Yale, almost as if he were driven to that association of thoughts which a moment later had him saying, “I suppose I’d have gone to Cornell with Pete if it hadn’t been a question of one more year with Dr. Dudley.”

“Isn’t there always a question of ‘one more year’ once you start with analysis?” Ken said.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“You’re sure Dr. Dudley is a big waste of time. Well, he isn’t.”

“That must mean he is helping you, that you feel better, that something’s changing.” He put his fork down. “We have the right to know it if that’s true.”

“The only thing it
must
mean is what it means to the patient,” Jeff said stiffly. “It does not have to mean what his parents want it to mean.” He also put his fork down.

“Stop talking riddles.”

“It’s no riddle. Analysis has one job, to help the patient, not his father or his mother or the rest of the family.” His voice roughened. “Nor the neighbors nor the executives at the office.”