Consenting Adult (30 page)

Jeff gulped; he heard the dry noise it made, felt the twist of pain in his gullet. “It’s rotten,” he said, “us having a row.”

“It’s not a row. Not what you could officially call ‘a row.’ “

“Good.” He breathed in hard, the deep inhalation at the end of a struggle. Unbelievably it had happened; unbelievably it was already over. Why the hell couldn’t he manage his rotten temper as well with his father or mother? If they only knew how he hated it
after;
if they only realized it was the same sort of writhing in his guts he used to have way back there at Placquette. He could never admit that either, not to the old man, not to his mother. They probably thought he never gave it another thought, after he had blown his top. There had to be some way to let them know, but he had never found it.

“You were starting to tell about a new group out in L.A.,” Nate said at last, in his ordinary voice.

“This friend of mine is tied in with them,” Jeff said. “It is one of the new kind, not the old-line kind, the Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis, not like that, the ones that go back to the Forties or Fifties. This is just the last year or so I’m talking about.”

“And—?”

“Their bag is a whole other attitude, about being gay and saying so. ‘Coming out’ is the idea, and the hell with it.”

“It’s happening here too. I guess in most big cities.”

“What do you think of it?”

“What do you?”

“I used to have daydreams about me telling the whole damn world all about the way I was—boy, it was a great daydream.” Jeff looked doubtful. “It depends on how you earn your living.”

“It does that, I guess.”

“This friend of mine writes comedy for TV. Big dough. If they canned him, he’d write comedy for films, or Broadway, or a novel.”

“It’s different for doctors. Sure it is.”

“And lawyers and ministers and anybody in politics and anybody in ninety million other jobs.”

Now Nate looked doubtful. “But there
are
these new groups just the same, springing up all over the place. The whole country is in some sort of sweat—the blacks, the women, now gay people starting fights for their own rights, civil rights, equal rights, whatever you want to call it—”

They stared at each other, each caught by the other’s intensity. Then Nate went on, “You know another group you’ll be hearing more and more from? Another dissident group that’s growing?”

“What sort of group?”

“Analysts, psychiatrists, not the usual run, but people who think you can be gay and okay at the same time—no need of therapy.”

“What is this group? Where do they practice? What’s their name?”

“Not an organized group with a name and address, nothing that tidy, not so far anyhow. But psychiatrists here and there, objecting to the stereotypes.” He went on to tell him about Halston Richards, Judd Marmor—

“Marmor?” Jeff interrupted. “He’s out in California.”

“Sure he is. What I can’t figure is why you’ve never mentioned his name or what he stands for.”

“I don’t know what he stands for.”

“Don’t you ever
talk
about this to anybody out there? You halfway through medical school?”

“Damn right I don’t” Pugnacity sounded again but he controlled it. “Remember that TV show about the playwright with the limp wrists, when I said you could call the other writer a coward if you wanted to.”

“I’m not calling anybody a coward now,” Nate said.

“You don’t say anything because you can’t. You’ve been conditioned for a lifetime not to give yourself away. You don’t start little conversations about what Dr. Marmor ‘stands for,’ not with your professors, not your faculty advisers, not with anybody. You shut up and think of your M.D.”

Nate felt holier-than-thou, yet he had begun something that had to be ended.

“How do you know all this anyway?” Jeff asked a moment later. “It looks as if you’ve been digging pretty deep in research already, no matter what the managing editor says.”

“Not doing it myself so much. I have a pretty fine researcher— that’s where most of this new stuff comes from.”

“A researcher on the paper?”

“Not on the paper. It’s somebody you know.” He looked carefully at Jeff, as if weighing for one last time the wisdom of going on. Then he said, “It’s Tessa.”

“Tessa?”

“Your mother.” Before Jeff could speak he went on quickly. “Look, it’s your own business, not talking things out with her, or with Ken either. Maybe in your place I’d shut up myself. I can’t say. Margie can’t say—we’ve talked about this a lot, and we agree, everybody’s got to play it his own way.”

“I’ve just said—”

“Sure. But there’s one thing you ought to know, that Tessa’s been making a kind of study, a big rounded study of what is known and what is not known, what experts agree on, what other experts don’t agree on—which just about covers the waterfront She’s been at it for years now, going at it with the same kind of excitement you feel for your med courses.”

“She never told me.”

“If she started, you’d shut her off. Even if she mentions some piece in the paper, you shut her right off. Margie asked her once, that’s how we know. But she kept on with this crazy research project, and she’s been learning from it and changing with it, sure that all sorts of people will start changing too.” He turned away from Jeff’s tense listening. “I told you all this because she never will. If she did you’d think she was butting in on something wasn’t any of her business. The point is, I guess, it’s everybody’s business.”

Jeff shifted his gaze back to the fireplace. Deep in the cooling ashes there was a fine faint tinge of color. It seemed to fade and glow, rise and fall. He thought of the bouncing point of light on an oscilloscope.

Tonight was the eve of Ken’s final spring trip for his firm, “my terminal trip,” he had called it with a grim humor. Next year in March there would be no traveling around the country to jobbers and leading bookstores. By then he would be sixty-five and retired from the publishing house he had helped so long ago to create and which for thirty-five years he had helped to run.

“But you don’t have to quit, Ken,” his partner, Ted Brannick, had said. “Officially, sure, but you can keep on in a consulting setup as long as you like.”

“The boss privilege,” Ken had replied, and turned it down. But he felt it deeply, the approaching retirement, felt it as a lowering curtain to his life, and none of the usual hearty remarks by his colleagues about how splendid it would be to be free of office hours, free of sales meetings and rising paper prices and rising competition, none of it struck below the outer skin of his mind. Not one of the people offering these comforting sentences would welcome retirement and the age of sixty-five that made it mandatory.

Tessa understood his refusal of the boss privilege, and also his scorn of the banal cheer. Sixty-five. A Senior Citizen. That infuriating nice-nellyism, that demeaning substitute for the once honorable word “old.” Was anybody in the full tide of life dubbed a Junior Citizen? There was a proliferation of repellent words about age that Tessa found insulting on Ken’s behalf, wincing internally whenever she read or heard them. The Golden Years, Leisure Village, Retirement Plaza, Senior Spa. But villain of them all was Senior Citizen.

The word was “old.” In ten years it would become her word and she would use it. “Now that I am old,” she would say, not “Now that I’m getting older,” as so many people did, as if to hold at arm’s length for indefinable extra time the truth and simplicity of that small word “old.” To his credit, Ken made it even simpler. “I’m sixty-four,” he had said the other night. “Next year I retire.”

So tomorrow he was starting on his last swing around the country for Brannick and Lynn. Again he had suggested that she meet him in Los Angeles, but this time she had declined, offering no polite excuses, saying openly, “It’s too soon, I still feel sensitive about it.” It had been more meaningful than she had guessed at Christmas, Jeff’s choice of Margie and Nate’s as the place to come home to. At the time she had managed it all rather well, she liked to think, with aplomb, with equanimity, but in fact it had left, if not a wound, then a kind of dark stain on her mood, still there. That time he had told them he wanted to study medicine, she had thought, He’s letting us help him again, he’s accepting us as his family again. But it had proved to be merely a brief intermission in a continuing action, named perhaps Separateness. Not merely Maturity, not Adulthood, but Separateness, another estate altogether. By the start of his sophomore year, Jeff had indeed found out all about student loans, bank loans, government loans, and though he had permitted his parents to co-sign some notes with him, he had made it clear that he never would call upon them for more than this perfunctory show of solidarity.

There was again something to admire in his independence, his decision to make it on his own, and this was warming. Nate had told her of his final session with Jeff, and she was touched that Nate had felt some inner impulse to tell him about “his researcher.”

“It hit him like a ton of bricks,” Nate had said.

She was glad Jeff knew, glad that Nate had been the conduit for the news of Dr. Richards. Strangely, there had been none of that sense of evaporation when she had told Nate and Margie about Halston Richards, and this she had ascribed to the fact that she had rushed at Ken straight from Mark’s office, while she herself felt stunned. In any case, now Jeff too would have this seed of a new viewpoint germinating in his mind, and perhaps he too would find its roots taking solid hold.

Tonight was also the eve of a trip abroad for Margie and Nate, their first vacation ever without the children, a celebration trip for Margie, who was returning in April to the commercial world, instead of remaining exclusively in “the much tougher job of mother, wife and housekeeper.” It had taken her all of half an hour to get back the job she had left eight years before, when Lynnie was just about a month from being born.

“And at thirty a week more pay,” Margie crowed. “Despite me being as rusty as an old nail. Bless this shortage of women willing to take secretarial jobs, and bless Mrs. Cole for being willing to hire me back on.”

“Will you mind working for a woman?” Ken asked, with a sly wink at Tessa.

“Daddy, you needn’t try on the male chauvinist act. You can’t begin to manage it”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tessa said. “There’s never been a woman partner at Brannick and Lynn, has there?”

“But we’re way ahead of Q. and P.,” Ken said, “for all your big new plaid office, and four of our top editors are women and have been for years. How many at your place?”

“Don’t rub that in.” She grinned at him and then at Margie and Nate. Her large new office at Quales and Park was a pleasant externalizing of her expanding position, and Tessa fully acknowledged her pleasure in her latest promotion, though in this her eighteenth year at Q. and P., she was privately rather mordant about it. Now she said ruefully, “I told you, I’m the company woman, just as Line Noble is the company black.”

“Token Tessa,” Ken said and laughed.

“You can laugh, Daddy,” Margie said. “You know damn well that if Mother was a man, she’d have had the big office five years ago.”

“Plus a few thousand bucks more per year,” Nate said.

“I know something else,” Ken answered. “From now on, it will be another rung of the executive ladder every few months, until she’s the first woman vice-president they’ve ever had.”

“Wouldn’t that be dandy?” Margie asked her mother.

“Everybody’s consciousness sure is being raised,” Nate said. “You’ve got to hand it to the women this time round.”

“But without the first time round,” Ken said, “they’d still be yelling, ‘Votes for Women.’ ”

He looked animated and it surprised Nate. Good for him, Nate thought, here’s one place where the poor guy is really making it. Of late he had begun to feel warmer toward Ken, prodded in part by Jeff’s scorn for the “look how broad-minded I am” people.

Nate understood the scorn; hadn’t he felt the same when people were broad-minded and tolerant about his being Jewish? And yet he felt now, more and more, that Ken had come a long way from where he had been; you had to give him some kind of good marks for the distance he had made himself travel, not only demerits because it wasn’t as far as he might have traveled. Maybe Ken could never stretch it anything beyond this—it still was a whale of a distance up from that hidebound little pit he had been in way back there when Jeff had first told them. Someday, Nate thought, I’ll try to make old Jeff see that.

A boisterous laugh from Margie brought him back to the general conversation. “It’s such a great satire, and such a great title,” she was saying. “I didn’t think she had any humor at all. You’d never think it, not from
Hurricane.”

“What great title?” Nate asked. “Who didn’t have any humor?”

“Helena Ludwig,” Tessa answered, a note of pride sounding. “She never used to show much humor, but she’s been letting it out of hiding, since she did join them.”

“These galleys I’ve been reading,” Margie said to him. “If s her new novel, about two girls who are into the feminist movement in a big way, both very bright, one a real sex object, the other definitely not. And Helena Ludwig gets them both perfectly, and the whole scene today, and the title of her book is
A Certain Envy
.”

For a moment Nate said nothing whatever. Margie was looking at him so expectantly that it suddenly struck. “Of course,” he said. “Good ole penis envy.” He laughed. “I gather she doesn’t buy the idea.”

“She runs it into the ground. The whole book does.”

“Challenging Freud?” Ken asked dryly. “Blasphemy.”

“Half a century’s gone by,” Tessa said. “If Freud were alive, he’d be checking over his early theories himself.”

“But, Mother, honestly,” Margie said. “No woman I’ve ever known agrees with this penis-envy bit. After all, Freud himself had parents and an environment shaping him too! That whole male-dominated era, that’s what he had, genius though he was.”

“
A Certain Envy
is one hell of a title,” Nate said. “He’d have liked it himself.”