Child of My Right Hand (13 page)

“Yes, I do.”

The Judge nodded.

“What if the military decided to test the blood of new recruits before allowing them to enlist as a way of screening out homosexuals? Would that be constitutional, Judge? An invasion of privacy?”

“I don't think homosexuals should be allowed in the military,” the Judge answered. “Too much fun in the showers. ”

“What,” Jack continued, knowing he was being baited but rising to it anyway, “about other employers? If the military can test, why not Anheuser-Busch? You wouldn't want homosexuals getting near those proud Clydesdales. What if HMOs could screen out homosexuality as a pre-existing medical condition, citing higher HIV infection rates? Or women carrying a gene that indicated risk factors for breast cancer, years, even decades before the disease developed. What if insurers could screen them out?”

Although his hands appeared steady at his side, Jack could feel them shaking. What the hell? He glanced at Genna, who said to everyone listening, which by now was the entire room. “Jack gets a little worked up about these things.”

“Understandably,” Billy said. “Now let's eat; I'm sure the soup is ready.”

They entered the dining room, and what a splendid table awaited them, a groaner, twenty-two places. Lalique crystal, sterling flatware engraved with ornate G's, a six-headed candelabra supplemented by so many single tapers blazing around the paneled room it could have been a wake, Jack thought, or a seance to raise the spirit of his departed mother-in-law, Doris. Who had died, he suddenly remembered and wanted to smack himself in the head, of breast cancer.

Assigned seats were indicated on name cards on each antique Havilland setting. Jack pocketed his: Dr. Jack Barish. Couples were seated opposite each other, with Billy's family at the head of the table, with Carolyn at the foot, half a time zone away. The teenagers were grouped near Carolyn, with the entire table arranged by age and the respect it was due; the Judge sat on Billy's right, opposite Gwen. Jack was between Gwen and Carolyn's mother, Betty, opposite Genna, who sat between Daddy and Carolyn's father, Earnest. When everyone had taken a place behind their chairs, Billy said, “Will everyone please join hands?”

Jack glanced across the glittering table at Genna who rolled her eyes. There was whispering then aspirated laughter from the teenage end of the table, one of the twins and Simon, from the sound of things. Jack wondered what they'd said and wished he were sitting with the kids. Then he took Betty's long-fingered left hand in his right, and Gwen's short, bejeweled fingers in his left.

“Lord,” Billy began, “bless this house and all its inhabitants on this day of thanks giving. We are especially grateful for the presence of loved ones who have traveled a long way to be with us.”

Jack smiled across the table at his wife. Damn nice of Billy.

“We'd also like to give thanks, as we sit down to this feast, for the memory of loved ones no longer with us, who cannot be here today for this meal. May my mother Doris, enjoy her turkey with you in Heaven. Amen.”

Many voices murmured, “Amen.” Jack released Gwen and Betty's hands, wondering what Gwen must think of dear departed Doris and celestial fowl being mentioned, what the etiquette of that was. He held the chair for Gwen. Watching him from across the table, the Judge said, “You know, if Doris is up in Heaven eating turkey, which I doubt, I bet she asked for the smallest portion of all the heavenly host. My wife, perhaps you remember,” the old boy winked at Jack, apparently forgiving the lecture in front of the hearth, “ate less than anyone I ever met. It was unnatural.”

Then the Judge sat and the maids circling the table swooped in to collect soup bowls. When the bowls returned, filled with consommé, Genna leaned towards him across the crystal, the silver, the burning tapers. “No matzo balls.” She grinned. “
Tant pis
.”

***

After Simon ate slices of turkey awash in a river of gravy the color and consistency of his poop the time he was sick in Mexico, but not cranberry sauce, nor the stuffing which was studded with oysters, gag me; oven-baked mashed potatoes decorated with that orange spice, what was it; yams sprinkled with brown sugar and belly button marshmallows, now you're talking; and that weird string bean and cream of mushroom casserole that Mom sometimes made; then apple and pumpkin pies topped with ice cream or whipped cream, both if you wanted it, for at Uncle Billy's Thanksgiving more was not only more, more was better, so that even the most ordinary foods were combined with something extraordinary; he followed his cousins upstairs to their suite of rooms, which was two bedrooms with this amazing bathroom in between, and told them he was gay.

He hadn't planned to. At least the conscious portion of his brain was astonished when the word popped out of his mouth moments after they closed Tara's door.

“I'm gay,” he began, as if it were no big deal, as if he were saying he was cold, so please turn up the heat.

“You're kidding,” Tara said. “Right?”

She sat beside him on her brass four-poster with its silk spread and matching pink pillows.

“He's not kidding, you stupid cow,” Nikki shot at her.

Boy, did she have a mouth.

“Why would he be kidding?” Nikki sprawled near Lizzie on the pale pink carpet. She turned to Simon. “Are you?”

“Who you calling cow, Horseface?” Tara asked.

“Cow, tits like udders.”

“Least I have tits.” Tara's full lips parted to reveal a mouthful of perfect teeth; everything about Tara was perfect. “You know,” Tara continued, “we had to stop riding lessons because other families kept trying to saddle Nikki. It was so embarrassing.”

Simon caught Lizzie's eye. One of the delights of visiting was how much the twins fought, their insults an art form he and Lizzie repeated for weeks afterwards.

“So,” Nicole asked, “are you kidding or not?”

“I'm not kidding.”

“Does that mean,” Tara grinned at her twin, then turned back to him, “that if I put my hand on your Willie, nothing will happen?”

“Something will happen.” Simon laughed. “I'll knock it away.”

“That proves it,” Nikki called from the floor. “All the other guys, when Tara puts her hand on their Willies at school dances, their eyes roll back and their Willies get big.”

“Not everyone.” Tara threw back her head, exposing her ballerina neck. She was such a pretty girl. “Sean Williams' Willie is tiny.”

“Oh, Tara, oh Tara!” Nikki moaned, and thrashed around on the floor. “You're sooo beautiful.”

“How many Willies have you touched?” Lizzie asked, the question coming out as a single word, HowmanyWillieshaveyoutouched?

“Lots,” Tara said.

“Oodles of Willies,” Nikki cried. “She's the Willie queen of St. Anne's.”

“Bow down, Dude.” Tara rose and extended her hand. “Queen Willie the First.”

“Bow down, Dude,” Nicole shouted, and knee-walked towards her sister, “and the queen will kiss your Willie.”

“Ooh,” Simon said in his too-high, too-excited voice, “that's so nasty.”

“What about you?” Nikki asked, “how many Willies have you touched, not counting your own?”

“His own, he touches like fifty times a day,” Lizzie called, getting in the game.

You little bitch, thought Simon. “More than you.”

“Not me,” Nikki said. “I don't touch Willies. That's my sister.”

“Fuck you, Nikki,” Tara shouted.

“Don't you wish,” Nikki shot back.

“Then lots more than Tara,” Simon said and hoped Lizzie, who was looking at him like he was crazy, would keep her mouth shut around Mom and Dad, or he'd get her back, that was for sure.

“That's easy,” Tara said, “because I haven't really touched any.”

“Liar,” Nicole shouted, and Simon didn't know who to believe. “What about J.D. Harris's Willie?”

“Shut up, Nikki,” Tara cried. “You are so mean.”

She was mean, Simon thought, and had been since they were little.

“What about Aunt Genna and Uncle Jack?” Tara asked. “Do they know?”

Simon nodded.

“And they don't care?” Nikki asked, that mean edge muscling into her voice.

“They say they don't.” Simon still didn't quite believe it.

“I bet they do,” Nikki said, “and they're being nice.”

“Our mom would have a cow,” Tara said.

“She already did!” cried Nikki.

“Fuck you, Horsey!” Tara tossed a pillow at her twin's head, then they were pillow-fighting like they used to when they were little. After he'd nailed Lizzie, pow, upside the head, she shouted, “Simon, you always hit too hard. You're such an asshole!”

To aggravate Lizzie (for yelling at him in front of their cousins), and because he really had hit her too hard, even if he wouldn't admit it, Simon said, “I really love my sister.” He wrapped her in a bear hug from which Lizzie struggled to escape. “Ain't she purty?”

“Jerk,” Lizzie muttered, but her heart wasn't in it, and the cousins sat on Tara's bed in comfortable, nostalgic silence.

Then Simon said, “You can tell your parents, you know.”

“Really?” Tara smiled her beautiful smile.

“Really.” Simon nodded and felt it, this need to tell his family, to be as large as his appetite before the Thanksgiving meal. “I wish you would.”

Friday morning the family splashed madly in the Holidome pool. Still feeling stuffed—that turkey, those candied yams!—Genna opted to skip breakfast and waved goodbye to Jack and the kids from the Jacuzzi. Lolling in the hot water, bubbles beating against her bottom—that pie, that oyster dressing!—Genna watched a bead of condensate wiggle across the steamy skylight above her head. The droplet enlarged and slid, gathering size and speed then plopped into the bubbling spa. Now there's a lesson, Genna thought. The great circle of life. Maturation, brief escape, heady freedom, then back in the soup. Last night, for hours, she'd tried to work up the courage to tell Daddy she wanted to speak to him alone. Finally, as the party was ending, she'd found him in front of the hearth. Forty-four years old and her heart yammered like a girl's.

She blurted out what she wanted, and Daddy's eyebrow arced like a wave. “Dare I mention you're talking to me now?”

She glanced nervously around. Carolyn stood near the couch with her sisters, three life studies for the same sketch: dark hair, long legs, button noses.

“I'd like to talk to you alone, Daddy.”

“If it's a loan, you'd do better with Billy.”

“It's not a loan.” Now she was grinning. “Would I ask you for money?”

“Too clever by half, aren't you?”

Didn't take cleverness.

“What is it then?” His eyebrow arced again nearly into his hair line. “Fatherly advice?”

He made it sound preposterous. Why had he desired this total abnegation of parenting? She didn't believe it was the same for Billy, and she felt the blade of that familiar sword. Daddy continued, more gently, “Are you in some sort of trouble, dear?”

Across her mind's sky, a single, towed banner. Jack had an affair last year, and I'm afraid he's starting another.

What would Daddy say? Been there, done that?

“I'd just like some time with you. Lunch tomorrow, my treat?”

He grinned, relieved to be back on more solid ground. He named Ladue's most venerable restaurant. “Shall we say one, one-fifteen?”

“Whichever.”

“One, it is. You remember where?”

She nodded. “Clayton and Price.”

“I'll reserve a table. And Genna.” He winked. “Do try to be on time.”

Genna rose, dripping, and headed for their room to plan her outfit. At precisely one o'clock, she stepped into Busch's Grove, having abandoned Jack and the kids to the pool and MTV.

“Why can't I come?” Simon had demanded. “I'd like a fancy lunch.”

That boy, she thought, stepping towards the maitre d', who was on the phone, never willingly skipped a meal.

“Because Mom's having some father-daughter time,” Lizzie said, with a wistful look at Jack.

“We could get our own table,” Simon said.

“No,” said Jack.

“It's not fair,” Simon declared and she watched the tendon bulge on Jack's neck.

“Courage,” she whispered as she kissed him goodbye.

“You owe me.” Jack brushed his lips against hers. “Tell the old boy hi.”

“Gordon, table for two,” she said as the maitre d' replaced the receiver and looked up quizzically. Wasn't she dressed well enough? “Is Judge Gordon here?”

The maitre d' shook his head fussily. “Your reservation is one-fifteen.”

Daddy—she thought, eyeing the maitre d's white shirt, black pants—You old skunk.

At one-fourteen—she was paying close attention, unaccustomed as she was to arriving first—Daddy sauntered in and looked around, dark hair combed impeccably back from his face. She wondered if he still used hair creme, if they still manufactured his brand, or was Daddy bonded to mega-hold gel, like Simon. When she was growing up, Daddy had looked quite a bit like that most atypical of St. Louis celebrities, T. S. Eliot. For years he cultivated the resemblance, down to the rimless glasses. Daddy had long since shifted to contacts, or had he tried that Lasik procedure he'd been talking up last year? He spied her from across the elegant room—white guests, still all black servers as in days of yore—raised two fingers in greeting, then strode towards her with impressive energy. No shuffling baby steps for Daddy. Genna rose and offered her cheek, which he gallantly kissed.

“You're late, Daddy. I've been here since one.”

“I'm not late. I always told Doris fifteen minutes early, too, except when I told her twenty. Now you know all my secrets.”

I doubt it. They ordered cocktails, Chivas, one rock, for Daddy, white wine spritzer for Genna.

“What a girly-girl,” he announced, when the drinks arrived. “Barely enough alcohol to souse a fly.”

“I'm just drinking to keep you company.”

He clinked his rocks glass against her fluted stem. “What say you really keep me company, eh, Genna?”

She ordered a scotch, which arrived with the first course. (If she were paying for Daddy's appetizer, Genna didn't see why she shouldn't have one, too. Her protein diet would start Monday.) Later, when she was in the ladies' room—it must have been then because she didn't see it happen—Daddy arranged for a third round which arrived with their entrees. By the time Daddy had consumed half his osso bucco, complaining it was a trifle tough today, she'd managed only a few nibbles of risotto. Chivas washed through her arteries as some distant estuary must have washed the prawns dotting her rice, like drowned raisins in the cream of wheat Doris had served all those lifetimes ago. Genna was half-plotzed, two-thirds, no five-sixths, which must have been what she wanted; there was no point matching Daddy unless the Land of Plotz was your destination. Now she'd arrived, and her fingers had no bones.

“Well, Genna.” Daddy raised that rakish lash, oh arched inquisitor's brow. “Ready to ask whatever it is?”

“My biological father.” She hesitated, not wanting to look too closely, but eager to see the pain Doris had predicted would stain Daddy's face. If there wasn't any, not that she wanted Daddy to suffer, but she wanted to touch him a little, perhaps not as much as Billy…“Doris's first husband.”

“Your progenitor.” Daddy set down his cutlery. “As I suspected.”

“Really?” She reeled through a river of scotch.

He took up his knife and fork. “I've been waiting all these years. Good God, Genna, haven't you wanted to know?”

“Of course.” She was spinning, and for a moment Genna feared she was going to be sick in the middle of this memorable lunch. Then the river rushed on, and she added, “But Mom wouldn't tell me. When I asked…”

“You asked?”

Daddy clapped his hand to his forehead like a Victorian thespian enacting surprise.

“And what did she say, your mommy dearest?”

“It would hurt you too much.” Genna brought Doris's face to mind, her elegant jaw and neck, and with it, her sense that Doris would have told her all if she'd asked at the end, “and how it wasn't fair, because ‘you'd loved me as your own.'”

“Ah, Doris.” Daddy threw back his scotch and looked around, Genna thought, for their waiter. “What a piece of work.” He caught their gray-haired waiter's eye, halfway across the salon, raised his empty glass and twirled his index finger beside it. Satisfied that re-supply was forthcoming, he began, “She used to tell me when I asked, and I did, I assure you, that you'd told her you didn't want any information about—”

Daddy smiled, drawing it out.

“—Denny Sweetwater, ‘because you loved me as your very own,' the only Daddy you ever wanted. Just like her, playing both sides.”

“Doris was married to a man named Denny Sweetwater?”

Daddy sliced meat from his veal shank and raised the fork to his lips without changing hands, another example of what he'd always considered his superior manners. “Who said anything?” He chewed, swallowed and raised another shimmering shred of osso bucco. “About marriage?”

The waiter arrived with another Chivas, one rock, for Daddy. He glanced her way—she didn't know what showed on her face, Denny Sweetwater?—but Daddy caught the waiter's hand. “Charlie, another for my daughter.”

“I'll be too drunk to drive.”

“I'll drive you.”

“You're too—”

“Never.” Daddy speared a cube of oven-roasted potato, slick with gravy, and brought it to his lips. “Now.” He popped the potato through. “Any questions?”

Genna thought of all the questions flapping through her mind like the small birds she'd glimpsed recently driving from Tipton to Cincinnati. Hundreds and hundreds, thousands, so many they looked like black bees against the sky.

“Tell me how you knew I was going to ask.”

“Sweetwater, you know, was one of them. The pink-socks brigade.”

“Daddy.”

“A homosexual, like Simon.”

“What do you mean, like Simon?”

“He hasn't told you yet?” Daddy sipped his Chivas, one rock. “He announced it to his cousins last night and asked them to tell their parents, which of course Nicole did. What a mouth on that little bitch. Takes after Doris. Billy called me this morning. Surely,” there went his eyebrow again, “I'm not telling you anything you didn't know?”

“Of course I know. But I didn't realize he told the whole family.”

“Why not? Sweetwater was very out front for his day too, according to your mother.” Daddy wiped his lips and set his knife and fork, perfectly aligned, on the edge of his plate. Somehow, he'd finished his entire bucco, while she'd barely touched her lunch.

“Have you considered therapy? Billy tells me they're doing wonderful things; he read sexual orientation could be changed.”

“I don't think so.”

Their water boy approached with her third drink.

“What about shock therapy? Every time Simon has a homosexual thought, you plug his unit in an outlet.”

“That's not funny.”

“I suppose not.”

Their water boy set down her drink and hurried off, mincing a bit, swinging his hips, and she could almost hear Daddy's thoughts—or were those hers—wondering if the water boy was one of them, too. She sipped the undiluted top quarter-inch of her scotch.

“Anyhoo, when Billy called this morning, I was certain you wanted to ask about Sweetwater. Jack must be anxious for an explanation that doesn't involve his side. A big strong jock like Jack, this must be hard on him.”

She eyed Daddy's long face. He was really very smart, if also mean. Well-matched with Doris. Jack had always claimed the old boy didn't like him, didn't like Jews, and she'd only half-believed him. With greater assurance than she probably felt, Genna said, “No, Jack's fine with it. It's not what we hoped for; I mean, it makes Simon's life harder, especially at the high school in Tipton. But it is what it is. Simon's Simon, just as Tara and Nicole are Tara and Nicole, and not each other.”

Daddy's eyebrow arced, as if to declare, If you believe that my dear, I'll pretend I do, too. He raised his Chivas, one rock, and she knocked her stubby glass against it.

“To what is,” he said.

“To what is.”

“And now,” Daddy added, “if you're not too schnockered, I'll tell you what I know about your pater veritas, Denny Sweetwater.”

***

When they set out from the Holiday Inn for the long drive east, Genna sat up front beside him. She'd returned yesterday from lunch drunker than he'd ever seen her except for a memorable camping trip years ago. The first night, beside a blathering stream, they pitched a new Northface dome, purchased for this, their first backpacking adventure. In the heady redwood-scented dark, they put away a bottle of B & B then wobbled beneath the velvet sky hollering whoopee. Genna was so intoxicated she kept falling, swearing she wasn't drunk, oh no, that darn freeze-dried food! In the middle of the night, when she got up to pee, she lost her footing and tumbled into the stream bed. Roused by her cries, Jack hauled Genna off the slick stones then held her hand to keep her from tipping over again while she squatted to relieve herself. The next morning, she moaned and groaned, carrying a heavy pack up and down the switchbacked trail, swearing she'd never touch B & B again, which, he believed, she hadn't.

“Denny Sweetwater,” she murmured, as their mud-and-snows sang over the highway, Go-in home, go-in home. She'd told him the name but not much more, when she returned yesterday from lunch. “Would you have married me if my name was Genna Sweetwater?”

“I was so wild for you, I would have married you if you were named Engelbert Humperdinck.” He touched her hand, which rested on the arm of her captain chair. For a moment, before looking back to I-70's three lanes roaring with holiday traffic, he wondered, After what's happened, can that possibly be true? Yes, he thought, and added, “I still am.”

“Doris and Denny Sweetwater,” Genna began, her voice pitched low to escape the kids' radar, “were close friends in college. She went to Webster, you know, in St. Louis.”

“I didn't know.”

Jack glanced in the rearview. In the captain chair behind Genna, Lizzie was hooked up to her Discman, reading, her head bopping to some punk rhythm. In the way back, Simon hibernated in a blanketed cave.

“According to Daddy, Sweetwater was an actor and a singer.” Genna's eyes met his, then danced away. “Outlandish, Daddy said, a bad boy, who scandalized the campus by drinking and taking drugs…”

“That doesn't sound so scandalous,” Jack said. “Even I did that.”

“Not in 1959. And by being openly homosexual.”

Got me there.

“And Doris, who was always something of an ice queen…”

“The old boy said that?”

“I'm saying that. There was this quality about my mother, an icy elegance, as if she never got laid enough…”

“I met your mother.”

“I know.”