The Road Taken (33 page)

“I’ll thank you if you never tell her.”

“I won’t. That’s up to you, when she’s a lot older, if you think it’s right.”

“And I’ll thank you if you go away again,” Peggy said.

“You can’t make me go anywhere.”

“Really? Perhaps not. But you’ll never see Markie.”

“Really? How is that going to happen? Are you going to cut yourself off from the family?”

“Joan, what do you want?”

“I just want you to like me,” Joan said. She wanted to say “love,” but she knew that was impossible. Maybe “like” was too much to ask too.

“Like implies respect,” Peggy said.

“I take it back. I don’t like or respect you either.”

“Fine.”

They stood there staring at each other. This was the way they used to fight when they were little girls. Nothing had changed. And everything had changed. Because now, whether they detested one another or not they were bonded, because of Markie, and Peggy was in control.

Peggy went downstairs then and Joan followed her. She stood silently while Peggy swept up her children and husband and said a hasty good-bye. Joan wondered if it was possible to be both numb and in pain, because she was both. When Ed and Peter and Markie and Angel kissed Aunt Joan good-bye, Peggy’s face had turned to stone.

I wish I hadn’t told her, Joan thought. But it was too late.

Chapter Forty-One

Rose was used to Peggy’s early departures from family events, but the grim look on Peggy’s face when she left disturbed her. Probably, Rose surmised, it had something to do with Peggy’s conversation upstairs with Joan.
Again,
Rose thought, disappointed. I just want everyone to be happy, but those two girls are so difficult.

The morning after Thanksgiving Peggy called her with her voice shaking. “Oh, Mom, my God, the most terrible thing happened last night. Ed and I couldn’t sleep at all. I don’t know what to do.”

“What is it?” Rose asked, alarmed.

“Joan told me . . .” She started crying and Rose had to wait for her to calm down before she could continue. “She told me that she’s Markie’s real mother.”

“Joan? But how could that be?”

Peggy told her everything that had happened. By the time she was done she was no longer weeping; she was angry. At first Rose had thought this new development was entirely too strange to be believed, but when Peggy had finished the extraordinary tale, all Rose could think was how little Peggy understood her sister. Joan was impetuous, and reckless, and rash, but what she had done for Peggy, Rose thought, was almost noble. It was a Joan thing to do. She knew exactly how Joan’s mind had worked. There was no subterfuge there; Joan had told Peggy the truth. Joan had wanted to replace Marianne. “Peggy,” Rose said gently, “why are you so angry at her?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why?”

“Mom, are you taking her side?”

“There is no side to take, Peggy dear. You have Markie. If you were two different sisters, with a better relationship, you would think what Joan did was heroic.”

“Heroic? Ed said it made him sick.”

“Then Ed has a problem, dear, and I don’t know what it is. I think bearing a baby for someone else is a very beautiful and kind thing. Only our eccentric Joan would think of it. You shouldn’t be angry at her, you should find it in your heart to be thankful. Markie turned your life around. Angel wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Markie. You’d still be in your house drinking yourself to death, and your husband would probably be regretting he married you.”

“Mom!”

“Well, it’s true, Peggy dear,” Rose said. She sighed. She wanted to hold Joan in her arms, and bristly Peggy, and all of them; she wanted to make Peggy and Joan kiss and make up, the way she’d tried to have them do when they were children; but they had hated the gesture even then. “What are you going to do now?” Rose asked.

“Try to go on with my normal life. Pretend I don’t know what I know. Attempt not to see my sister Joan’s face every time I look at my older daughter.”

“But they always looked alike,” Rose said mildly. “It’s the family resemblance.”

“What scares me the most, Mom, is that Joan is going to want to butt in and tell me how to raise my child.”

“Did she say she would?”

“We didn’t discuss it.”

“Why don’t you just wait then?”

“And?”

“And then you’ll see. In Joan’s mind, Peggy, she gave you a gift. She isn’t going to try to spoil it.”

“When we were kids, Mom, do you remember how Joan would give me a birthday present and then she’d always want to play with it? She’d say: ‘I gave you just what I wanted for myself.’ I don’t think she’s changed.”

Rose tried not to laugh. “It’s not the same thing. Joan isn’t very maternal.”

“Like to bet?”

“I’d win the bet. If she wanted a husband and child she would have gone ahead and made it happen. A pretty girl like Joan didn’t have to be alone. That was her choice. I don’t understand it, and neither do you, but that’s the way it is.”

“Are you going to tell Dad?” Peggy asked.

Rose thought about it for a moment. Poor Ben, who had so looked forward to enjoying his older years without turmoil. Life had made him tired. He did not deserve to have to make decisions of morality and loyalty at his age. “I don’t know,” she said. “In some ways, even though he’s accepted Hugh, Ben is still old-fashioned. This might be too much for him. I think he would be shocked. As long as you’re not telling people . . .”

“Do you actually keep secrets from your husband?”

This time Rose did laugh. “I don’t know a marriage that has survived without them.”

“I don’t know a marriage that has survived
with
them,” Peggy said.

“That’s your generation. ‘Togetherness.’ It’s not mine. We preserve each other’s peace.”

“You’re right,” Peggy said carefully. “We won’t tell Dad. He might agree with you that my sister is a heroine. I certainly don’t want to have to deal with that.”

Oh, Peggy, Rose thought, there has always been something missing in you, and I wonder if it isn’t compassion.

***

Telling Hugh was another matter than telling Ben. Of course Rose told Hugh the whole story, swearing him to secrecy. Nothing ever shocked her brother.

“What an amazing thing,” Hugh said. “Poor Joan. No wonder she’s been so unhappy these past years. There was Peggy, with the life everyone approved of, raising Joan’s own child while Joan had to look on like an outsider. What must that have been like? I have always been convinced that a part of Joan wanted a husband and children of her own but she just didn’t know how to go about it.”

“Do you really?” Rose said. “I didn’t think that.”

“Well, I did,” Hugh said. “She’s so popular, but after a while something about her just scares men off. Trust me, dearie. I wasn’t always old; I’ve had experience with those brutes.”

“You don’t know if they left her,” Rose said. “Maybe Joan broke up with
them.
”

“No,” Hugh said. “You know how Joan will say something she doesn’t really mean, that makes other people angry? She can’t help it. Do you remember how when she was in school her teachers used to say she was her own worst enemy?”

“Yes,” Rose agreed. “Poor Joan. Perhaps she scares sincere men off eventually; that might be it.”

“So what will Peggy do?” Hugh asked.

“Nothing. And we will do nothing. It’s the way both Peggy and Joan want it. Everyone will go on with their lives.”

They looked at each other and sighed.

“We must not tell anyone,” Hugh said. But of course Hugh did not include Teddy with “anyone,” since the two of them had no secrets from each other, or at least very few, and he knew Rose knew that.

So Hugh told Teddy. For reasons neither of them expected, it made them both sad.

“I wish someone would give us a child,” Teddy said.

“I know,” Hugh said. “I’d make an exemplary mother.”

And of course Hugh and Teddy told Ginger. It would not be fair, they agreed, to leave her out. They knew the telling would stop there; Ginger had no one to tell.

***

Ginger was thirty years old now, a doctor, working in a lab as she had always wanted to, one of the many researchers who were looking for a cure for cancer. She had another, better apartment now, although as always she spent very little time there. She had friends, as she always had, but usually she sublimated herself in work. She knew she must be the world’s oldest virgin.

Sometimes Teddy and Hugh teased her about it, since they all saw how outside, in the world, things were changing, and even she was aware of it. People took drugs, they were euphoric, they slept with each other for no reason other than that they could. Suddenly, it seemed, in the last part of this decade, social life was a grab bag of amorous possibilities, and everyone was invited to share. Anyone could sleep with anyone, and could have as much sex as they felt like having. Ginger was a workaholic perhaps, but she was not a hermit. She had been to parties, and she knew that, if she wanted to, even she could have sex, if she were willing to have it with a man who didn’t love her or even much care about her, who would think fucking her was odd and interesting, an adventure, an evening’s interlude. I fucked the cripple, she imagined them saying afterward; it wasn’t bad, but she wanted me to go down on her.

The longer she waited the more afraid she was, but she knew she couldn’t wait forever, whatever it took.

Veterans were coming back from Vietnam now in wheelchairs, like herself, young men, even younger than she was, heroes, bitter. Everyone knew someone who’d been paralyzed from polio, that vanished disease, and many of them had made lives for themselves, as Christopher had. But it seemed to Ginger she belonged on the fringe of the maimed and the bitter, with the people who had been deprived of something important for no reason, with no reward. She wanted to meet a veteran in a wheelchair; she thought he might understand her. On the other hand, she might be just the person he wanted to avoid.

It was when she heard about what Joan had done that all these thoughts came marching relentlessly into Ginger’s mind until she couldn’t hold them off any longer. It seemed to her that Joan could do anything, and she herself could do nothing. Joan’s casual sexuality—whether it brought Joan happiness or not—made Ginger think about sex. It was ironic, Ginger thought, that a situation that was really about a mother and a child, about a gesture, about salvation, only made her think about getting laid. It made her more aware than ever that she was being deprived of sensuality. If everything made her think about sex these days she had good reason, but what Joan had done was the catalyst.

That Christmas Peggy and Ed and the children did not come to the family for Christmas Eve or Christmas dinner. Everyone knew why. Peggy was avoiding Joan. Instead of gathering at Rose’s house as they had planned, the Glover family went skiing. Since none of them could ski they were all going to learn. Of course it was a slap in the face to Joan, and it made the usual festivities somewhat strained, but the people who knew the sisters’ secret said nothing, and those who didn’t know didn’t even notice there was a problem. Joan had never gone to Larchmont to visit Peggy again after her revelation, and Ginger knew she had been looking forward to seeing Markie at Christmas. Joan left the family dinner early, whether because she was upset or because she had a date Ginger didn’t know. But she herself left soon afterward because there was a party to which she had been invited, and seeing Joan, miserable or not, made her conscious all over again that she had only half a life.

So, over the Christmas holidays, Ginger lost her virginity at last.The man was a doctor she had known for a while, who was quite a ladies man. It didn’t hurt as much as she had expected. Nor was it as much fun as she had hoped, but she had always heard experience would improve things. Meanwhile, marijuana certainly did. Aphrodisiac drugs, everyone said, made it all much better. In anticipation of her new adventures she went to her gynecologist and started on the Pill.

The man who relieved her of her virtue never called her after that one night, but then she found someone else, and then eventually someone else. It was easy after all. In six months Ginger had five lovers, if you could call them that since they never lasted, and she felt like a part of the world. She was not sure by now that she wanted to be, but here she was: a girl whose values had been forged in the repressive fifties and who had been set free.

There were the men who ran away in a hostile panic as soon as it was over, and the ones who were friendly and kind. None of them were leisurely lovers and they didn’t even seem experienced. Perhaps no one had told them they had to be good at it, or maybe they were afraid they wouldn’t be; most were obviously more interested in penetration than in getting there, and the sooner the better. Her fevered days with Christopher at Warm Springs had been, she knew, the result of sublimation, of fear of “going all the way,” and what they did with each other was so all-encompassing, so passionate, because it was all they were willing to do. Exciting foreplay, Ginger was beginning to think, was just what you performed when you couldn’t have anything more. And if it were up to the man, foreplay would be what the woman did to him, not vice versa. Or maybe that was only how men treated her.

She would have liked to ask Joan about her own experiences, but they were not intimate enough with each other. She certainly couldn’t ask Peggy; it would be too specific—is Ed good? Ginger was too shy to confess her feeling of vague disappointment to her friends, and besides, she knew people pretended it was all wonderful. Maybe, for them, it was. For her, the knowledge of having had sex was the wonderful thing, and if she didn’t have her memories of Warm Springs, she would have thought this was all there was.

***

When Ginger told Hugh and Teddy she wasn’t a virgin anymore they congratulated her, in the same tone they had used when teasing her. None of this was to be taken seriously. Sex was recreation; better to have it than do without. For young unmarried women like Ginger and Joan the onus of having a sex life was long gone. But it was still considered wrong for two men to be lovers. It was easier in the world for Teddy than for himself, Hugh thought, because Teddy appeared straight, and thus it was possible (and often necessary) for him to pass. As for himself, he had always been so effeminate and flamboyant, even before he knew he was gay, that none of this was an issue he had any control over. People would like him or they wouldn’t. Hugh didn’t want to get bashed on the head in the street for who he was, he didn’t want to be arrested for what he was doing, but he couldn’t hide or pretend he was what he was not. He was used to the insults. He had heard them all his life.

There was a revolution sweeping through society, and Ginger was only one of the people who were beneficiaries of it. Everyone wanted their rights. I have been waiting all my life to be respected, Hugh thought, and if I were much younger I would be an activist too. But who would join me? Who would be so brave?

It was June now, the beginning of summer. Rose had reported to him that whenever Joan asked Peggy if she could come to visit her Peggy said no, and Joan had given up and seemed depressed. Rose, hurting for her middle daughter, had told Joan she knew Joan was Markie’s mother, and that she was proud of her, and after that Joan seemed closer to Rose if to no one else. How cruel Peggy is being, Hugh thought.

But Peggy was getting her comeuppance. Peter was turning into quite the hippie. He was wearing strange ethnic clothes, his hair was long, he had a beard, and he was planning to go to the big outdoor music festival to be held at Woodstock in August and sleep in a grassy field. And, most outrageous of all, Peter saw Joan on his own. He liked her; he thought she was modern and understanding, all the things his parents were not. So Joan would end up being friends with Peter instead of Markie, Hugh thought, and it served Peggy right. When Markie was older she could make her own decisions too, if Peggy hadn’t poisoned her mind.