Equal Affections (6 page)

Louise had looked away. “I think,” she said, “that I resent Eleanor because if she hadn't gotten sick, I never would've married Nat.” And suddenly she laughed. For there, finally, there it was: the ugly bead of truth she'd come to search for.

Eleanor got sick, and Tommy disappeared. Everyone disappeared. Everyone, that is, except for Nat, the skinny boy whose mother had visited, coming by on his bicycle to shout news and gossip to her through the bathroom window. She always acted as if she couldn't care less, but then again she was also always there in the afternoon, sticking her head out the window as if she just happened to be staring at the dandelions. When Nat asked how things were or how Eleanor was feeling, she simply shrugged her shoulders and said, “Fine.” She was always twisting a strand of yarn or a piece of string around her finger. “Fine,” she'd say. Or: “Better today.” But usually just “Fine.”

When the quarantine finally ended, Nat put on a new shirt, bought flowers, and waited by the door, figuring that Louise would emerge from her entrapment full of lust and vigor and energy, that she would jump into his arms and smother him with kisses, so grateful that he alone had stuck with her, had kept in touch. But instead she headed
immediately back to Boston, where Xavier, the Portuguese sailor, had just docked. Nat helped her mother clean up the sickroom.

The summer ended. They returned with their families to mainland houses. Nat and Louise dated each other when Xavier was away or she wanted to convince her own worried mother that she was seeing the right kind of boy. They didn't start having a proper love affair, in fact, until the following summer, and by that time she had returned to Little Nahant, this time without her family, to work as a waitress. Nat, in order to raise money for his tuition at Harvard, had to take a job at his cousin Sydney's garage, so several nights a week he rode his bicycle through pitch-black night along the little spit of road that connected the Nahants to the mainland, and then, in the early, early morning, with dawn just cracking, rode back.

Years later they went back.

It was the very end of April's
Discovery
tour, on which Danny had accompanied her, and they went to Boston to witness her glory. They had never been in Boston with the children before, so the afternoon before the concert, Nat, in a fit of nostalgic longing, rented a car and took his family on a drive along that legendary spit—a pencil of land just wide enough for a road, bounded by water on all sides—and Danny tried to imagine what it had felt like for his father, barreling along the flat road in utter blackness, knowing that in her little room Louise was waiting for him. The island hadn't changed much, they saw, from what Louise and Nat remembered; it was still crammed with small, brightly painted houses, and honky-tonk clam bars, and fat mothers surrounded by gaggles of children. Faithfully they drove to the address of the lemon-yellow house where Louise had been quarantined and, down the road, the lime-green house where Nat had lived and loved her. It was the very end of summer, that needy time when everything rots, and the stores fill up with notebook paper, shiny binders, pencil holders, lunchboxes. Along the sides of the roads sunburned children jumped up and down to keep the soles of their feet from getting burned. On the beaches women lay with their fists curled, desperate for last-chance tans. Louise stood on the beach, looking at the empty lifeguard stand. She was wearing a suit—a light gray skirt and matching jacket—which made her appear rather incongruous among the tanned, swimsuited children and mothers; rich; aloof. She had taken her shoes off and was rubbing her stockinged feet back and forth
in the sand. She held a small, imperfect sand dollar between the heavily ringed fingers of her right hand. How strange she looked! Almost an icon, a statue, in her formal suit. The beachgoers walked around her. “Don't stare!” Danny heard a woman instruct her child, as if she already recognized in Louise herself forty years from now, coming back with that look of prior ownership and lived history, that look of someone who has been around long enough to have earned the privilege of remembering.

Danny and April and Nat stayed by the car; they waited till she was through.

Then she walked back to them, her shoes in her hand, sand in her hair. “That was the Goldbergs' house, wasn't it, Nat?” she said, pointing to a small, white, stuccoed cottage into which a little girl in flippers was just disappearing.

“Yes,” Nat said. “I believe it was.”

___________

Xavier, the sailor, died at sea in the Second World War. Tommy Burns went to war too, but he came back a decorated hero. His white teeth flashed across the Boston Common as he received his medal. (Louise, newly married to Nat, stood in the crowd, a scarf pulled over her hair to protect it against the rain, and clapped like crazy. He probably wouldn't have remembered her anyway. She was working in the shipyards then, welding battleships, while Nat got his degree.)

A long time later Tommy Burns became Tom Brent. He was Sheriff Bo Tucker on
The Wild Country
. Wednesday nights from eight to nine the television was reserved for Louise, until the series was canceled. Then for a while she'd see him every few weeks doing a guest spot on a cop show or sitcom. Then he disappeared for years from their television.

One afternoon in the late seventies Louise was riding the Exercycle, watching
Password,
when she started to scream. “What?” Nat cried, running in from the garden. “What's wrong?”

“It's him, Nat! It's Tommy Burns! Look!”

Well, he had come back—older now, but still handsome as ever. His hair was streaked gray. He was wearing a dark suit. He stood against a beige background, a tiny, white-shingled house cupped delicately in his hands.

Tommy Burns was the Allstate insurance man.

N
o one could pinpoint exactly when April started singing. Danny thought he remembered, from when he was four or five, hearing her in her bedroom, strumming her little guitar in accompaniment to renditions of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” “Five Hundred Miles,” “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Later she performed these songs for their parents' friends after dinner parties, at the piano. “A regular Eydie Gorme!” Aunt Eleanor would say, tapping her cane against the floor. She pronounced “Gormé” without the Frenchified accent, so that it sounded like a word people might use on Mars.

They had moved a few years before to a neighborhood just off the university campus, officially called Redwood Park but affectionately known as the faculty ghetto. Every fourth Tuesday Louise hosted a tea for the department wives, and every third Wednesday Nat hosted a study break for the computer science graduate students. April and Danny usually hid in April's room during these festivities, emerging only when a sharp rap at the door demanded their appearances. Danny could hardly say which group he dreaded more. The department wives wore crisp little suits; they touched him with powdery hands and asked him how school was going. They knew too much about politeness. The graduate students didn't know enough about politeness. They didn't wash. They were vacant-eyed young men who pocketed their pens without capping them, so that their shirts were always bleeding blue at
the heart. Danny did his duty, shook their slick hands, then ran back to April's room. It was a different world there. April's room had avocado-color carpeting; it had thick curtains patterned with immense, fullblown flowers and dangling with little white powder puffs. She burned incense on the desk. She had a drawer, and in it was a book called
Sexual Love
by Tamako Nagawachi, M.D., which she let Danny read all he wanted. (Danny particularly liked the chapter that described wet dreams and suggested extra-soft pajamas as a deterrent to them.) He liked to sniff the smell of April's room—a strong, female smell, which she made no effort to hide or cover. She did not believe in shaving under her arms, and she also didn't believe in deodorant, much to the chagrin of her mother, who insisted that excess underarm hair increased body odor in women—a scientific fact, she said. (April laughed at that.) She had long blond hair everywhere—on her head, under her arms, wisps of it on her legs. She made all her own dresses, mostly out of purple velvet embroidered with hearts and moons, and sometimes she wore bells around her ankles. In her room, on those occasional Tuesdays and Wednesdays when she and Danny joined together in resistance to social niceties, she liked to lie on her bed, a mirror propped in the crick of her elbow, and work the long blond hairs under her arms into tiny braids. Other afternoons, when she was feeling more industrious, she gave Danny guitar lessons. She showed him how to pick, and how to make A and D. He sat on her lap, her fingers pressing his smaller fingers down onto the frets, and while he strummed, they sang together: “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “The Muffin Man,” “Barbara Allen,” “The Impossible Dream.”

When she graduated from high school, April decided to attend the same university she'd grown up in. This was not because she liked the place, only because it was free; she could not justify her parents' shelling out money to finance an education that was going to be basically worthless, she said—a supposition on her part to which Nat responded with bitter invective, and Louise with a slight shrug of the shoulders, a chastising “Oh, now, April.” Danny remembered moving April to her freshman dorm; it was about two minutes from their house. Still, April insisted on packing everything she owned, all her clothes, her records, her books and stuffed animals, lugging them out to the car, driving them down and unloading them in the little cinder-block room she was to share with one Vilma H. Pampas of Los
Angeles. Her freshman year, when Danny was nine, she joined a hunger strike on the lawn of the president's house, which was across the street. Nat became incensed. Louise, worried about malnutrition, filled the kitchen with bottles of orange juice and vitamin C, thus turning it into a refueling station for starving students. Twice a day April brought groups of protesters by the house, and Louise fed them vitamins and orange juice, as well as an occasional, surreptitious apple slice. Danny hid in the laundry room off the kitchen, watching the pallid students down their pills. Why was it that they had to fast while he could eat? he asked April, who explained that she and her friends were protesting the firing of a popular professor who was being denied justice. Danny couldn't figure out the connection between these two conditions: Was he, in eating, aiding in the denial of justice? Must he fast as well? Worried, he wolfed down an entire package of Oreos while reading the backs of the empty orange juice containers. Fasting for a day was impossible for him to imagine.

It didn't stop there. All through Danny's childhood, it seemed, April was demanding that their family, for political reasons, not eat certain foods. Grapes, for instance. Louise would wheel her grocery cart down the supermarket aisle, and the little globes, piled in decadent bunches, would seem to Danny so sweet, so good in their beady greenness that he'd break down and beg his mother for some, ashamed at his own lack of resolve. Still, Louise was firm. “Do you know how much the men and women who pick these grapes are paid?” she'd say. “April told me, it's something like forty-two cents an hour. We're talking about children, Danny, children your age, sweating in the fields. They sleep in dirty shacks, without blankets, without toilets. How would you feel if you had to sleep in a dirty shack, with no room of your own, just so some other little boy could eat grapes?” But then, passing the fruit section and the mountains of grapes a second time, she'd let him pick a few on the sly and eat them right there in the store.

In Danny's elementary school civics class, he debated Roger Krauss on the grape-boycotting issue. Roger Krauss's father was the president of the local chapter of the National Rifle Association. “Would you like to sleep in a dirty shack?” Danny argued, but because Roger Krauss was more popular, the decision, by vote, went to him. It enraged Danny, already, the way that politics worked.

Afterwards, at lunch period, Roger Krauss and his friends would
torment Danny—dangling the little bunches of grapes over their faces, eating them as seductively as women in Maxfield Parrish posters.

Shortly after all this happened Salvador Allende was assassinated in Chile.

Danny remembered April crying hysterically at the kitchen table. “It was the fucking CIA!” she shouted.

“Come on, April,” Nat said. “The CIA! Really! You kids, with your conspiracy theories. What does the CIA have to do with Chile?”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” Louise said. She was doing dishes, her hands deep in sudsy water. “Mark my words, Nat,” she said. “I would not be a bit surprised.”

“Ha!” Nat said. “Ha-ha!” He considered the possibility so absurd that when the weekend news marked Louise's words, he had to retreat to his toolshop in the garage for the rest of the afternoon. Louise walked around the house looking shell-shocked. To her own surprise, she was surprised. “Surprise,” she later wrote, in a speech to be delivered to the Mothers Against the Draft, “was perhaps the single most important factor in awakening a backwards, middle-aged housewife like me to the problems in the world I lived in.”

Sometimes, when Danny was in his late teens—all this years after April had dropped out of college, changed her name, and begun touring the country with her songs—Louise would have the Mothers Against the Draft over to the house for coffee and cake, the way she used to have the faculty wives. Nat, back early from his computers, slunk into the kitchen, alarmed by the collection of station wagons crammed into the driveway, and there he'd find Danny drinking Tab and suffering through an internal debate as to whether or not he too should register for the draft when the time came. Louise, oddly enough, felt that he should in order to protect his status as a conscientious objector; Nat, who took the whole thing far less seriously, disagreed.