Consenting Adult (19 page)

They had quarreled bitterly, about that, about everything, about nonsensical long-buried nothings that now became the surrogates for their pain and grief, and at last they had slept together, not even touching, but in the need of each to feel less abandoned. For her that need had kept on long past those first days. She had in part lost her anger at Ken, knowing too well what tangle of emotion lay behind his behavior, and she found that she needed him in a new degree, needed his actual presence if he were delayed or absent, feeling the biting impact of stillness in the house, as if it were now a hostile occupant with her. Unexpectedly she had found a continuing comfort in Ken’s continuing remorse. Not that he harped on it, but telltale phrases revealed every so often that it remained an operating factor in his thoughts. “When you get trapped by thinking too far ahead,” he had said one evening, talking of some situation at the office, “it can be a tighter trap than not thinking ahead at all.” She had heard the double meaning and an ache arose dully within her, for him, for herself, for their shared deprivation of the son they both loved and missed.

When the others had left home, Don and Margie, it was to marry and have homes of their own, families of their own, in the sweet natural sequence of the generations, but this departure of their last child was a knifing asunder, sudden, raw and somehow ruthless in its essence—perhaps as ruthless to Jeff as to them. But this they would never know, for no one would ever tell them.

At the beginning there had been some comfort in knowing that Jeff was living with Margie and Nate, remaining “part of the family,” almost like his being off at school and to be home again in the not too distant future. Tactfully Margie had suggested in the first days that it might be “better if you don’t phone too often at the start,” and Tessa had not called at all, except during the day when he was at work and she could ask for news of him. There was little news, except that he had meant it about not going to Yale. He was going to college right in the city, was indeed already enrolled at C.C.N.Y. and would not need a cent from his parents for the rest of his education.

An unexpected unwillingness had mounted hotly in Tessa at the news, a snob unwillingness she was ashamed of. City College was fine, Hunter College was fine, free education and public schools were of the essence—she had never questioned that. But she had never questioned, either, the other values, the social values, the later-in-life values of schools of a different sort, the private schools with the better facilities and equipment, with the quiet campuses and quads, the better-known faculties and better-known names. It was distasteful to her to feel that dismay within her own thoughts, but she was caught with it. Caught red-handed, she thought ruefully, thinking ahead to his interviews or résumés when he applied for some job at some snob office where Yale ‘65 would get him the job that C.C.N.Y. ‘65 might not.

The rueful thought, however, had proved the beginning of a cure, and before too long she had begun a turnabout in attitude which she also could not help mistrusting a little. Soon she had begun to feel proud of Jeff for his independence, for his own lack of the snob quotient, and finally for his determination to do it on his own. She wished she could tell him so directly, instead of through Margie or Nate, and finally she had telephoned him one evening. It had inevitably been a stilted call, with most of his replies the usual Jeff replies of “Okay” or “Great,” and most of her own contributions equally pallid, but after she had asked how his job was going and what movies he had seen, she did manage a word or two about finding herself rather impressed at his “gutsy decision” to go to college on his own. “Yeah, well, it’s the one way,” he had said, his voice putting period, paragraph to that discussion.

Toward the end of that first summer—she still had not seen him—there had come a letter from him; she remembered the twinge of fear when she stooped down to its familiar handwriting on the envelope outside the hall door. But it had merely told her that he had been referred by Dr. Dudley to a Dr. David Isaacs in New York, and before he even paid his preliminary visit to this New York analyst, he thought it best to check in with her about whether she still was willing to have him continue, “despite the big hassle with Dad.” The schedule would be the same, the cost the same.

She had written her answer in three sentences and mailed it within minutes. “Of course, Jeff, for as long as it’s any good to you. Or as long as you think it might be. And whatever else, don’t forget I love you. Mama.”

She had been relieved that he was persisting with it. The Greeks had said, “Know thyself.” The moderns said, “Get analyzed.” The purpose was the same, and for a while she could again think of him in analysis with relief and an unseen comfort. Yet as time had brought another series of “no comment” bills from the new Dr. Isaacs, each as blanked of any awareness of the recipient’s anxiety as Dr. Dudley’s monthly bills had been, vouchsafing no information except that numerical precision, Jeff … eight visits, Jeff … nine visits, her own interior rage had again mounted at the resumption of The Silence. This time she could not even visualize the doctor who sat at the head of Jeff’s unhappy couch, could not guess whether he was young or old, thin or stout, bearded or clean-shaven. Dr. Isaacs had not even felt the necessity of asking her in for a preliminary visit. Apparently when a patient was in the second year of analysis, all that was regarded as pertinent was the previous analysis data or set of opinions.

There was something so lofty in all this, she had decided, that it had to be resented by any but the most ignorant and docile of parents. The analytic profession made the assumption, it was clear, that the patient was all, that the patient alone had value or importance. To demur at this was to put oneself into the obnoxious position of saying, “But I am important too.” Yet she could not help thinking that somewhere in the ancient Hippocratic Oath there might have been some phrase, some small dangling modifying phrase that said, “And I also affirm that I will never be sadistic to those who love the patient and wait to hear how he fares, well or ill.” In other medical situations, the surgeon who did not send out word from the operating room as soon as possible, or the doctor from the sickroom, was regarded as a brutish type; why, then, should there be so gross an exception made so routinely toward parents when the illness consisted of neurosis or psychosis? Had Freud or Adler or Jung all remained so distant from those who longed for a word, a clue, if not anything as definite as a prognosis?

Somewhere she had come across a reference to a letter Freud had written to the unhappy mother of a homosexual, but she had been unable to find the letter itself; no library catalogue listed it, and neither Mark Waldo nor Nate had ever heard of it. But she was somehow sure that Freud hadn’t written that letter to be aloof, to be cool and correct, that something of insight and caring had gone into it. If she ever found it she might send a copy, also without comment, to the new Dr. Isaacs, neatly tucked in along with a monthly check. She might even send a copy to Dr. Dudley, for old times’ sake.

Ah well, let it go; if Dr. Isaacs could help Jeff, what else would matter? Even if he could not help him change over, any more than Dr. Dudley was able to—

She never knew when it was that she had first given in, as it were, to a theorem she had been harboring for some indefinable time but which she had been steadily shoving out of consideration. Without articulating it, she had somehow begun to know that Dr. Isaacs’ “help” would have to come in some subtler form than the simplistic happy-ending twenty-five percent which she had for so long had fantasies about, that miracle transformation into an uncomplex heterosexuality.

There was something cruel, she thought at times, in any psychiatrist even speaking of that twenty-five percent, except to people who had already entered the magic percentile, and to their parents. What of the other seventy-five percent? Did they, who did not achieve “the cure”—did they not find in their analysis an added loss of self-worth, an added burden of failure and exclusion? And if so, was not psychiatry itself adding, to three out of four of its young patients, an extra and overwhelming pain and trauma?

She had kept all this to herself, not wanting to share its sharpness with Ken, but he must have sensed that she was going through some new phase of discouragement, for suddenly one evening in that first fall Ken had looked across the room at her and said, ‘Tessa, let’s clear out for a few days over Thanksgiving. It’ll be rough for you this year, so let’s take a powder instead, go somewhere way off. What do you think?”

“It’s nice, you thinking about it.”

“Sometimes it’s okay to think ahead, I suppose.”

“Oh, Ken, it’s a good idea. Let’s not think too much, let’s just go. Let’s decide where and we’ll go.”

And they had, to London for a week, and it had been strange to spend Thanksgiving far from the family, strange and in its way healing. They had seen plays, they had seen British publishers and agents, they had seen authors, they had forgotten the great American celebration of organized thankfulness, or nearly forgotten. Don and Jenny were managing the whole holiday, and Don was for a while the Don of yore, saying, “We’ll take on the whole damn thing for everybody. Go ahead and don’t worry about a thing.”

Don had been anything but the Don of yore as far as Jeff was concerned. When he first heard of his leaving home and why, he had asked him out for lunch, and later said to her, “It’s a damn shame, a kid like Jeff.”

“He’s still Jeff,” she had retorted.

She had been hurt, hurt on Jeff’s behalf, hurt on her own, in a solidarity she couldn’t quite explain. Siding with one son against the other was a bad business, but there it was. In the ensuing months, Don seemed to stay away from Jeff or any mention of Jeff, as if to protect something of his own that might now be threatened. Don was an architect in a large, rather conservative firm, specializing in public buildings, schools, libraries, museums; he and Jenny had their own children and their own problems. It was natural for him to find little time for a younger brother. Jeff and Don had been drifting apart for some time, but after that one lunch, they drifted further, apparently without so much as a phone call between them. By her own code, she could not chide Don for his neglect, or suggest that this might be a period when an older brother’s support could be especially valuable. Only once did she show open irritation at Don; it was at Don’s own house and he had been talking about another young architect at the office.

“The word is that he’s a homo and—”

The real word,” she said sharply, “is homosexual.”

“What? Why-oh, I see. I’m sorry.”

That may have been, she was to think much later, the first time one of those words hit me like a rock in the face. More and more, as time passed, did words like “homo” or “fag” or “fairy” send the same knife of loathing through her, at the person who used them, as did words like “kike” or “nigger.” But when they were used in a joke that brought loud laughter, the loathing was for herself too, because at the end of the joke she laughed with the others, despising herself for the laughter as for a corrupted cowardice. She noticed that men always laughed at these jokes with a special ring, a salacious ring, and she wondered why this should be so. Ken had once said he wanted to hit anybody who said “fag,” yet when he was present, he would laugh too, along with everybody else.

One evening she had asked him about this and in a burst of words, for him a burst of words, he had said, “It’s instinctive, not to give anything away.”

“I wonder what Jeff does, when he hears the jokes.”

“He laughs too.” He sounded weary. “The whole business is so nasty and complex.”

Another memory … Ken’s writing to Jeff. What it had cost him she could only surmise. It was during that trip to London and he did not talk about it in advance, nor did he seem inclined to discuss it afterward. He had gone to the desk in their hotel room late one afternoon, sat there for a while, pen in hand, eyes raised to a hunting print on the wall above him, and then wrote rapidly for several minutes. When he had finished, he handed her a single sheet of paper.

Dear Jeff,

This isn’t an easy letter to write, but I have been thinking of writing it for quite a while. I think you mistook my resentment to some degree, but I can see why you did. I was angry at your apparent willingness to go on for an unlimited time with analysis, without giving us the benefit of any interim report of progress—or even of lack of progress. I think you showed that you didn’t really believe that we care very much about your well-being and your happiness and your future. Now, a few months later, and especially with the absence you’ve elected, it seemed important to me to try to put some of this into words to you. I hope you’ll read between the lines, since I don’t think I’ve got it down clearly enough even now. I hope we’re to see you before too long.

Always,

Dad

She had read it twice, her throat tight, and she had said only, “Send it now, Ken, don’t change anything.” They had looked at each other and a spurt of sympathy rose in her, a small hot geyser of feeling, almost pity. It must have been harder for him than he had been able to say, all these months of knowing that it was he who had set into motion the roiling turbulences of distance and separation between them and their own son. She suddenly wondered whether her own willingness to forgive had been deep enough. Poor Ken, he had his own freight to carry, piled upon him from his, own childhood and his own upbringing, as every other human being had his own inherited or environmental burden to carry, through all his ensuing life. As she had. As Jeff had.

Jeff had answered the letter by a phone call on their return from England, a short call but the first call originated by him. “It’s me, Mama,” he had begun soberly. “I got Dad’s letter, could I talk to him?”

“He’s right here. It’s nice to hear you. Wait a sec.”

“Hello, Jeff,” Ken had said. “Good to talk to you.” There had followed a few sentences and then she had heard Ken say, “Maybe we can get together for part of Christmas. I’d like that and so would your mother.”