Consenting Adult (20 page)

She had nodded to Ken, and then nodded once more, as if she were signaling, yes, yes, get it set, make it firm, a commitment. And she thought, Maybe everything will come back together again after all. Jeff is not vindictive, neither is Ken. Maybe—

Christmas had been merry enough, she remembered, and all the other Christmases since then. It was at Margie and Nate’s that the tree and the presents and the gathering of all the family had taken place, and Jeff had managed their first meeting since the break with an odd and mature dignity. The “Hi” and “Great” never sounded; he had greeted her solemnly; she could still hear his “Merry Christmas, Mama,” and feel his kiss on her cheek, he stooping in his old way to plant it there. Then he had straightened and looked at his father. For an instant neither of them spoke, then it was Jeff who said, “Dad, Merry, merry,” and they had shaken hands. Ken had put both his hands around Jeff’s and something in Tessa was moved by that simple fact. The extra hand, the reaching gesture, the small offering beyond the orthodox greeting. If Jeff noticed he had given no sign, and the general bedlam of other greetings, from Don and Jenny and their children, from an excited and bewildered Lynnie, all mixed in with admiration of the handsome towering tree and the lavish spread of bright and shining packages beneath it—it all made a combination potent enough to sweep them all along in what seemed like happiness.

Her memory again … that summer afternoon a year after Jeff had left them, and Margie calling her to suggest she stop by on the way home from the office.

“Just you and me, Mother. Nate won’t be here, and neither will Jeff.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Not from my point of view, or Nate’s.”

“Then it’s about Jeff.”

“Ring the bell hard, in case I’m in the garden with Lynnie.”

It was going to hurt. This was something Margie felt she ought to know, some line crossed, some definition arrived at. As she remembered back to that August heat smashing at her skin, she could again hear Margie’s voice beyond the closed front door of their house saying, “It’s your grandma, Lynnie, should we let her in?” and again the door was opening on them, Lynnie chittering away, pressing against Grandma’s knees in greeting. All young animals were enchanting, she remembered thinking then, puppies, kittens, lion cubs, but a baby human was appealing beyond all the others, and one’s own beautiful little grandchild was traditionally irresistible. Her heart had lifted. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt.

“You both look grand,” she had said. “What a tan.” They had taken their vacation in Bermuda, as she and Ken had often done when they were young sun worshippers, but in their own Bermuda days, nobody took year-old babies along on vacations; now all young couples seemed to, their babies slung across their backs in papoose-like harnesses. It was a delight to see them.

Margie led the way to the back of the house to the small oblong of garden that was beginning to show signs of their planting and care. A round table, painted white, shielded by a chintz-lined umbrella rising from its center, had three chairs placed around it, and a sharp visual image struck Tessa, of Jeff and Margie and Nate all seated there together, laughing and talking together, comfortable and free of strain, contemporaries, removed a thousand miles from the continuing crises of Jeff’s last year at home. Envy pierced her, almost jealousy. They were the young. Apart from any other tie, apart from any other relationship, they had, all three, that singular relationship: they were the young. They saw the world the way the young saw it, right or wrong; it was their world and their view of it, theirs, as if the older generation were slipping off its very surface, were already loosening its grasp on today’s life in today’s world, its hold still tight on the past, on memories of the Depression, of Roosevelt and World War II, of Truman and Korea, but yielding to the young as far as the present and the future were concerned.

“All right, dear,” she said after Margie had brought out a cool drink for her and one for herself. “What’s this about?”

“About Jeff, as you guessed.”

“You said nothing was wrong.” She heard her own tension and it annoyed her. “Is there something, after all?”

“Nothing he’s told us about,” Margie said. “Look, Mother, we’ve been through this before—Jeff doesn’t tell us what he does, whom he sees, whom he likes, Except for that first night he came here, he’s never ‘confided’ one thing.”

Then it isn’t just me he excludes, Tessa thought swiftly. I’m glad. She said nothing.

“The thing is,” Margie continued, “we don’t expect him to and he knows we don’t” Faintly she stressed the
we
and waited for her mother to make some comment, but in turn Tessa simply waited for her to go on. “The first thing you thought of when I phoned today,” Margie continued, “was ‘Is anything wrong?’ But Nate and I don’t even think of ‘trouble’ about Jeff, and that makes him feel easier with us.”

Tessa flushed. “Did you get me over here to tell me how much wiser you two are?”

“Now, Mother. We don’t feel wiser or feel anything. I asked you over because I didn’t want to blast this at you over any phone. Jeff is moving out”

“Moving out where?”

“Up near college, to ‘a dump,’ to quote him, that he can afford.”

“When, Margie?”

“Next week. He’s been searching for it for a long time, and he’s been driving a cab nights, to stack up some extra money.”

“I didn’t know—well, I never do know any more, do I?”

“We didn’t know about the one-room flat until he located it, and that was yesterday.”

“Driving a cab every night? Can he manage college if he does?”

“You know Jeff. Top-of-the-heap no matter what he does on the side.”

“Yes.” There was a silence while they looked away from each other. Then Tessa said, “Is he going to live alone?”

“If he’s going to have a roomie, he hasn’t said.”

“I don’t suppose he would. Would say, I mean.”

Margie made no reply to this and Tessa regretted having said it. The garden seemed suddenly hotter, the air more humid.

“He also said,” Margie went on, “he was going to keep on with Dr. Isaacs one more year. Even if there weren’t any miracles available. Just as insurance, he said, or maybe a little peace of mind about the way you are.”

Tessa stared at the ground. Reason enough, yes. If analysis could free you of the clawing and clutch of self-hate, then thank God for that. So all those long-ago daydreams of a “cure” were dimming for Jeff too, or possibly were already over. Almost it was as if she too, in this single moment, were feeling a greater peace of mind. But then there came the wrenching longing that she could still be back there seeking out Mark Waldo and Dr. Dudley, still fierce with supplication and hope.

Aloud she said, “Tell Jeff, of course I’ll back him for more analysis. He knows it already, but tell him again.”

Suddenly Margie leaned toward her and kissed her. “I wish it didn’t hurt you so.”

“If only it didn’t. You’re a nice girl.”

“Some of the world’s greatest people—”

“I know, dear. I really do know. I’ve been giving myself an entire education—”

“Nate told me you were.”

“It’s none too easy to get any answers, though. There are always supposed to be the right answers in the back of the book, but not about this.”

“So Nate tells me. He says it keeps shifting all the time. And growing. It’s become a sort of special field for him.”

“Is he still hoping to get enough space in the paper someday?”

“You know Nate.” Unexpectedly she picked Lynnie up and hugged her, so hard that Lynnie yelped in protest. “He’s not the fellow to lay off a subject just because the managing ed thinks he should.”

“He’s a one, that Nate.”

Margie hugged the baby again. “We’re pretty lucky,” she said to the top of Lynnie’s head.

“She has a great daddy,” Tessa said in a swoop of resentment. “You’ve heard a hundred times over that Dad never meant it for that day, or even for that year.”

“I didn’t mean to compare Nate with Dad.”

“Unconsciously you did. Dad is what he is, just as Jeff is what he is. Why can you young people find it so easy to stay loose and easy about the way Jeff is, and so tough to stay loose and easy about the way Jeff’s father is? Or Jeff’s mother, for that matter.”

“Oh, Mother, please.” She rose, put the baby down and began to pace up and down on the thin strip of grass beyond the graveled circle. She looked angry and Tessa thought desolately, All I have to do is antagonize her and Nate. Then my life would be complete.

There had been no antagonism, and when she had told Ken that Jeff was moving to a place of his own, he had only said, “He’s never going to come back here, Tessa. I’ve known that for a long time, and you must have too.”

“You seem acquiescent about it.”

“I think I’ve been preparing for it”

“In general, you seem calmer about him. I’m glad.”

“It’s easier in the abstract.”

“You mean, not seeing him.”

“I think it makes it easier.” He paused and then slowly added, “For him too.”

It was still vivid, the sound of those slow words. Ken still preferred not to talk in any depth about any aspect of Jeff’s life, and the drift of months and years had not perceptibly changed him in that regard. Now, in this year of 1965, he would be sixty and there was no doubting the sixty. He had remained reasonably well; he had long since lost any look of the invalid. He disliked remembering that he had ever had a stroke and was remarkably free of the hypochondriac need to talk of symptoms or medicines, but there was visible in his eyes now a fatigue that eight hours of sleep did not clear away, and visible in the hold of his muscles and sinews an inability to give full support to the skeleton and organs within them.

She was grateful that he had rejected the role of the chronic invalid so stoutly and admired him for it. And somewhere along the road she herself had managed to reject at least part of her resentment that he did not want even to hear about what she had once called “my entire new education.” It was her own search, of course, a search that might slake her own thirst to know whatever there was to know about homosexuality, and Ken could scarcely be held accountable if he did not share that parched need.

But she had kept on searching. God knew, she had never stopped searching. It had become an interior part of her life, that searching. She had never returned to that first obsessed need to cram herself with scientific works by Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis and Freud; she had realized soon enough that she could not extract true meaning so cheaply from what was to her an alien terminology in an extended foreign field.

But she had begun a different kind of reading, her own kind of reading, layman’s reading, fiction and non-fiction, every kind of book about the homosexual and homosexuality, good books, bad books, older works by André Gide and Marcel Proust, newer ones by James Baldwin and Jean Genet and Gore Vidaland Mary Renault, as well as an increasing crop of recent “sensations,” these latter mostly novels, and for the most part so explicit in their sexual descriptions that she found them repugnant.

Yet in the moment of feeling bruised and revolted, she would remind herself that she also found many recent heterosexual novels equally repugnant because of their explicitness. Totally opposed to any form of censorship, she had always drawn back in her own tastes from specificity in writing about sex, and now she was growing sick of the vulgar dynamics in so much current writing, the descriptives, the directions, the juices and smells and pulses and stroking and groaning and all the rest of the clinical minutiae which a certain kind of author apparently held essential to evoking in the reader an understanding of passion or love.

One of the greatest love stories ever written, she thought one evening, was
Anna Karenina,
and if she remembered—it was years since she had read it—Tolstoy had given no physical detail at all about their making love. She wondered if she did remember, and with her predilection for looking things up, went to the bookshelves and took down the novel. The gold lettering on its spine was barely legible; she looked inside to the title page to see the date of this particular edition and was not surprised to find it nearly thirty years old, pleased also, for its age seemed to speak of its universality. She began to read, skimming the early chapters until she came to the first meeting between Anna and Count Vronsky, then she began to read the subtle course of their early attraction to each other. Soon she was no longer skimming but reading again the words and sentences she had first read when she was young, read them now with a responsiveness she could never have felt in her youth. And then at last, nearly two hundred pages into the long novel, there came the beginning of a new chapter, and with an admiration that was an admixture of a reader’s feelings and an editor’s, she read the words Tolstoy had chosen for his grand scene of culmination and passion. She read the brief paragraph and then read it once more; the editor in her made her copy it, to take to the office for future use with some young modern author who felt that the one and only way, the obligatory way, to write about the act of making love was with “honesty” and the inclusion of every detail.

“That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why.”

Tessa read it again in her own typing and visualized it as a few lines in the manuscript of one of her own authors. It was of course out of the question today. There was an other-century flavor to it, a formality, a strangeness which came not only from the fact that it had been written in another language, in another time, but written in another set of values. A gem of a paragraph, a small masterpiece within the larger masterpiece, its delicacy lay not in the retailing of what the lovers had done, what the lovers had touched, fondled, caressed, spoken, but in the consummate art of suggestion.