Blood Royal (16 page)

Marlowe had watched changes coming over Robbie that she didn’t understand and couldn’t relate to. Yeager, the school bully, had gone on to fresher meat, but Robbie brought on jeers from other boys because of his long hair and jewelry. While her parents’ problems had faded into the woodwork over the past few months, her concern for Robbie had increased. That she was increasingly coming to realize that he was not sexually orientated like everyone else around her, like everything she had been taught to expect about sex, had made her conclude that he was sick and she needed to find him a cure.

Men who loved other men rarely showed any inclination toward their sexual preference in public. If they did, they were subjected to scorn, ridicule, and beatings from straight guys. Homosexuals were not just banned from the army, many companies would fire them if they made their sexual orientation known. As her father was quick to point out when he saw Liberace on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
homosexuality was illegal. “That sodomite bastard belongs in prison,” he said.

She couldn’t imagine what two men would find attractive about each other, being hairy and muscular and all that.

She hit a stack of books next to her with her elbow and one fell off the pile. A scrap of paper used as a bookmarker slipped out. She read it as she started to put it back in the book. “‘The love that dared not speak its name.’ What does that mean?”

“It’s something that was said during Oscar Wilde’s time.”

“Who’s he?” The picture on the cover showed a strange-looking young man of great height with girlishly long curly hair and a velvet suit with a lace collar. “He looks like a giant version of Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

“He is,” Robbie said. “Oscar Wilde was the model for the Little Lord Fauntleroy painting. He was a poet and playwright back in the Gay 1890s.”

“Was he queer?”

“He was a homosexual, if that’s what you mean.”

“Robbie, are you queer?”

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

“Then don’t talk to me
that
way.”

“Shhh,” he said, as she started to verbally pounce on him. “Listen.”

Marlowe heard the voices coming through the vent from the other room.

A sound came through, causing Marlowe to flinch—a slap. A sob from her mother followed.

“He hit her!”

She was on her feet before Robbie could stop her. She flew through his door and tried the handle on her parents’ bedroom door. It was locked. She banged on the door. “Let me in! You son-of-a-bitch! Stop hitting her! Stop it! Let me in!”

She pounded until her hand hurt. When she stopped, she heard her mother crying. Her knees went weak and she slipped to the floor. “I’m here for you, Mom, I’m here for you,” she sobbed.

Marlowe stayed in bed and didn’t get up for school the next morning. She heard her father leave as usual at six and Robbie left for school nearly two hours later. It was ten o’clock before she got up. Usually her mother would have bugged her by now. When she walked in the kitchen, her mother was making dough for a pie.

Her mother didn’t turn to look at her when Marlowe entered. She continued to knead the dough, pushing it harder and harder with her hands. Marlowe could see her mother was tense.

She fought back tears as she came up behind her mother. “Mom, why do you let him hurt you?”

Her mother swung around and slapped her. The blow sent Marlowe staggering back.

“Mind your own business!”
Her features were raw and ugly. She was trembling. Marlowe had never seen her angry or explode before.

“What happens between your father and me is our business.” Her mother shoved the toaster off the counter. It flew over the edge and dropped until the still-plugged-in cord stopped it. “I don’t want you ever spying on us!” her mother screamed as the toaster flopped against the cupboard door.

Marlowe left the room in a state of shock. She cleaned the flour and dough off her face and left the house. Her mind was swirling. She needed to talk to Robbie. She didn’t understand why her mother had hit her, why her mother had not accepted her as an ally in the terrible treatment that she was getting.

Nothing made any sense, her father hitting her mother, her mother not fighting back, her brother dressing like a hippie queer.

At sixteen years old, it felt as if the whole world had gone crazy.

“You can never tell what goes on between a husband and wife in their bedroom,” Tom Crowell told Robbie.

They were seated in the enclosed patio at the back of the Crowell home. Tom was the high school swim coach. Robbie sometimes came to his coach’s house to practice and receive instructions from the coach as Robbie swam in a long, narrow lap pool in the backyard.

Robbie was seated on a wicker couch with his right leg extended out to a footstool. His leg had cramped up as he swam laps. Tom sat on another footstool and rubbed Robbie’s upper leg to release the tension.

“Nerves,” Tom said, massaging the leg. “You’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

Robbie liked his swim coach. He was the only teacher he really could relate to and the only sports coach he could even stomach. Tom was not like the full-time phys ed instructors—they were all macho guys with locker-room humor that most of the boys liked and Robbie hated and dreaded because he was often the butt of the rough humor. Tom was different, more intellectual, more worldly than the dumb-jock coaches. Robbie figured it was because the swim-coaching job wasn’t a full-time one. Most of his school duties was teaching history.

“Did you ever read
The Catcher in the Rye
?” Robbie asked.

“Of course I did, everybody has to read it in high school or college, it would be un-American not to.”

“Really?”

“That’s a joke. You are uptight, aren’t you?”

Tom’s wife, Cathy, came through the door from their family room with a pitcher and two glasses. “Lemonade. Do we have an injury?”

“Robbie cramped up during practice. Painful, but we probably won’t have to amputate till later.”

“Good, I hate the bloody messes you make when you cut off the legs of your students. I’m running over to my mother’s with the kids. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

She gave her husband a peck on the forehead and left.

“What about
The Catcher in the Rye
?” Tom asked.

“Sometimes I feel like Holden Caulfield, like I’m stuck in a phony adult world and I have to keep running from place to place to find the truth.”

“I think all boys and maybe even girls feel like Holden Caulfield. You young people see the hypocrisy of the people who run the world. That’s one of the great charms of being young—until you grow up and become a hypocrite like the rest of us, you have the innocence of the little boy who saw that the emperor’s new clothes were a fraud.”

“What did you mean, when you said you can never tell what goes on in the bedroom between a married couple?”

The coach shrugged. “Exactly that. Married people don’t act all the same. It’s different strokes for different folks. I imagine my minister and his wife sleep in bedclothes and have sex with the lights off. There’s a couple two doors down that are into wife-swapping. They’ve invited me and Cathy to a party where house keys get thrown into a hat and you go home with the person who drew your key.”

“No way. Did you do it, too?”

“Of course not, but the point is, husbands and wives don’t live by a single set of universal rules. Sometimes a man even abuses a woman.”

“And she lets him get away with it. That’s what’s driving my sister nuts. She can accept the fact that he’s a bully and gets off hitting our mom. But it drives her crazy that my mother doesn’t do anything about it.”

Tom shrugged again. “Maybe they feed off each other, maybe she’s afraid, there’s a lot of other maybes. Whatever it is, it’s nothing you can control. It’s between your mother and father. You’ll find out when you get married that you and your wife may not have the same bedroom habits as what you imagined they would be like.

“What your sister did embarrassed your mother. It was her bedroom secret and your sister brought it out into the open, exposing your mother’s humiliation. That’s why she exploded at Marlowe. Your sister had inadvertently made matters worse by trying to help.”

As Tom talked, he guided his hand up and down the boy’s leg.

Robbie started to say something and then hesitated. Finally he got it out. “What if I didn’t get married? Ever.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just what if? What if I just didn’t want to, you know? Does everybody have to get married and have kids? Can’t some people have a different sort of life?”

“What sort of life do you want?”

Robbie shook his head. “I don’t know, I just don’t know. I’m so confused. That’s why sometimes I feel like the guy in
The Catcher in the Rye.
He thought about killing himself. Sometimes I think it would be a relief just to do it, like kill myself so I wouldn’t have to deal with all this crap.”

“I don’t think it’s unusual for someone your age to wonder about suicide. I did, too, and I wondered about marriage, too.”

“You did? Did you ever consider not getting married?”

“In our society, it’s what men do. They get a wife, a family, a house, a car, and a job.”

“What if … what if a person, a guy, just wasn’t attracted to, you know, married life?”

“You mean not attracted to women.”

Robbie nodded. “Yeah, I mean that, too.”

As his coach’s hands gently caressed his upper leg, gliding up closer and closer to the crotch of his bathing suit, Robbie had the urge to grab the man’s hand and push it hard against his groin. It wasn’t the first time that he felt aroused being near him.

“I don’t think it’s unnatural not to be attracted to women. Not all of us are.”

“You are,” Robbie said. “You have a pretty wife, two kids.”

Tom Crowell smiled a little sadly. “I told you that you can never tell what goes on in the bedroom with a married couple. I love my wife and my children, but that’s not my entire life. There’s another part of me, a piece of me that I’ve never been able to share with my wife, that she would never understand if she found out.”

As he spoke, the coach’s hand slipped up Robbie’s leg and in under his bathing suit. He grasped the boy’s throbbing penis.

“We are a lot alike, Robbie. More than you probably realize.”

Marlowe was in her English literature class when she was called out by the school principal’s secretary. She was seventeen, going on eighteen. She basically hated school—it was February and she had less than four months to go to graduate. When she did, she knew she was getting out of Modesto. She had been treading water, carrying a C-plus average, just getting by until she could bail out of hell—Modesto High School—and move to San Francisco.

There had been a time when moving to San Francisco had the lure of a mecca, but that had been when Robbie lived there. He was no longer in San Francisco. He had been there for about a year, fleeing the valley as soon as he graduated from high school, but he had come back to his hometown in a box hauled by Giovanni Brothers Mortuary.

Poor Robbie.

Overdose,
had been the diagnosis.

He had made a quantum leap from smoking grass to shooting heroin without stopping in between. Fresh from small-town Americana, he had arrived green in Baghdad-by-the-Bay and got into a clique of bright young men, most of whom had fled small-town Americana and come to the Bay Area to experience “a different way of life.”

But Robbie had not found love in the arms of another man. The love that he had been actually searching for was love of himself. He tried to fill the hollowness within him with drugs.

Robbie’s death had splintered the James household. Marlowe blamed her parents for her brother’s death, her father for being insensitive—and even cruel—when Robbie wanted to march to a different drummer, and her mother for not being strong enough to deal with the fact that her son had chosen a controversial lifestyle.

They hadn’t been there for Robbie. They had abandoned him emotionally when he found himself confused about his sexuality. Marlowe had accepted his decision to go to San Francisco and find his place in life. But she had been unforgiving toward her parents since the day a San Francisco police officer called to tell her parents their son had overdosed and flatlined from heroin.

She remained in the house, but got a job at the beginning of her last year of high school, soon after Robbie’s body had arrived back to be buried in the town he had fled. She worked part-time at a Foster Freeze, saving every cent she made. She had a game plan—she felt that she had to finish something. For Robbie’s sake, she had to get out of Modesto and make it in San Francisco.

“There’s been an accident,” Mrs. Gomez, the principal’s secretary, said. “You—you need to get to the hospital.”

“An accident?”

“It’s your mother.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know. I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

She was lying, Marlowe knew it immediately, there was something in her tone of voice. But Marlowe didn’t want to push it, didn’t want to know. It would take fifteen minutes to get to the hospital. She could wait. The phrase “no news is good news” flew through her mind.

As they walked to the car, Marlowe could tell by the woman’s body language that it was bad. Really bad. The woman kept giving her sideway glances and seemed about to say something, then would close her mouth and stare straight ahead. “The doctor will tell you,” the woman said. The woman wanted to tell her, wanted to blurt out the tragedy and share the moment of traumatic drama with her.

Marlowe didn’t insist on an answer—she didn’t want to know.

It had been hard to concentrate at school for the past couple months. Nothing had seemed real to her. But Robbie’s death was real. She saw his face in the coffin. And his death stayed in the house, his ghost a depressing element. Her mother had taken it the worst, talking little since Robbie died. “It’s my fault,” her mother had said. “I killed him.” Her father had started berating her mother for taking the blame, but Marlowe had gotten in between and shouted at him, “Touch her, you bastard, and I’ll call the cops!”