Consenting Adult (16 page)

What a metaphor! Even as a joke, it’s a revelation of that insidious recurring problem tearing at every generation. Who is supreme? Who comes first?

Funny, Margie seemed to have disposed of the problem since her marriage to Nate. There was some quality in Nate, some outgoing quality, a willingness for dimension in a family, and it had brought out an answering warmth in Margie, so that now she seemed more willing than before to have parents again, as Nate was willing to have his parents. Maybe it was Margie and Nate she should talk to now, not Dr. Dudley or even Mark Waldo.

But of course she couldn’t. They were so joyous with their little girl, so filled with discovery. Lynn, they had called her, the name chosen well in advance by Nate. “Whether it’s a boy or a girl,” he had explained, “it will be Lynn Jacobs. What a great name. Equal status of husband and wife, intermarriage, and damn good-looking on a theater marquee or the spine of a book or a by-line in a newspaper.”

She would wait, and not intrude her pain into their happiness. But if she did not talk this out soon with somebody, she would go mad. Somebody who would not retreat into monosyllables. Somebody who would not refuse all information as Jeff so stubbornly did. In a way, she thought, they are alike about it. Each with the same need to slam doors in my face, as if it all had nothing to do with me.

The sensation of a door being slammed shook her, as if the air itself vibrated and splintered about her, as if shock waves actually impacted against her skin. Never before had she felt more isolated.

It’s half my fault, she thought stormily. I let them both do it. I accept it as if only they had the right to decide what’s to be said and what’s not to be said. As if I’m either Jeff’s mother or Ken’s wife, but never
me.

An uneasy warning told her that this was no time to switch tactics, not when she was angry. In the same instant she heard herself say, “Ken, I’ve tried a couple of times to tell you, and I’ve never really made it clear. The principal reason Jeff applied to Yale is that he needs to be near New Haven, for another year.”

“Needs to?”

“Because of Dr. Dudley.”

“Dr. Dudley?”

“One more year of treatment. I hope only another year.”

“Another year. Oh, dear God, that means there’s been no change.”

“It means he still is young and unformed, he still needs help and still is going to have it.”

“If you want to go on.”

“Of course I’ll go on.”

He stretched in his chair, as if he were comfortably sleepy. Then he said, “I think I’ve always known that was why he picked Yale.”

“If he went somewhere else, he’d have to start all over with a new analyst and cover the same ground. It must be hard for him.”

“Analysis is always hard, I gather.” He stretched once more and then turned to the manuscript he was reading. A few days later he said, without preamble, “I’m not going to make my trip next month. I don’t feel up to it. Maybe later.”

Every spring he toured the country in March; once it had been a necessary selling and publicity trip to the major book jobbers and bookstores of the nation, but in recent years it had been an elective trip which he made because he enjoyed renewing old contacts in the field. “A kind of stag holiday,” he used to say. “Every man deserves one.” She had always agreed, was sorry now that he was calling it off.

“Oh, too bad, Ken. It always does you a lot of good.”

“I might go later on.”

“Like when?”

At first he did not answer. Then, very quietly, he said, “In June. Before it gets too hot.”

For a moment there was a total silence. Then she said, “You can’t mean the first week in June?”

“Tessa, I do mean it.”

“But you’ll miss Jeff’s commencement.”

“I’ve thought it all out and I’m positive that this is the thing to do just now. I don’t think he’ll mind one way or the other.”

“He will mind. It will be a kind of public insult.”

“Tessa, you’re dramatizing. You always dramatize so.”

“Now you are attacking me.” Her eyes filled. “Either we don’t talk about Jeff at all any more, or if we do, we end up in some sort of polite sarcasm or well-mannered attack. You never used to be this way and it’s awful.” This time it was she who left the room. She discovered something: it helped. Physical separation eased something.

She began to acknowledge the need to stay away from Ken, from the house, from the uncertainties that waited there. For the first time, the telephone calls made late in the afternoon about having to work late began to come from her to Ken instead of the other way around, calls about having to see Helena Ludwig at cocktails, or Virginia Grabig or Mary Jasper. A lifetime of habit prevented her from lying to Ken, so she lied to her authors instead, contriving to set up the late dates with them instead of seeing them during normal office hours. Each time she did it, she felt uneasily that she was jarring loose something that had always been solid. But that was for the first few times only.

On April 12, Jeff turned eighteen, and Tessa telephoned to wish him Happy Birthday and offer congratulations about being accepted by Yale. He sounded happy and self-confident Yes, he had received her present, gee thanks, and he was going to call up about it, but then he thought he ought to write instead and had kept putting it off. Gosh, in the last semester of your last year, they sure kept you hopping up here.

“That’s always the way. Any other news?”

“Well, old Pete drove over to New Haven with me, to help give it the once-over, and I think he wished he wasn’t slated for Cornell.”

“College sounds nearer and nearer. When’s commencement exactly?”

“The sixth, Tuesday the sixth of June.”

There was a pause. Self-consciousness took her, like a thumb against her vocal cords. “Dad might not be able to come up for it. He’ll have that big annual sales trip he always makes.”

“In June? Boy, that’s a good one.”

“This year, the spring trip had to be put off. I think it was because—”

“Well, I don’t! And you don’t either. You know why he’s shifting his goddamn publishing swing to the first week of June and he can just go to hell and shift it. I have to hang up now.”

She could not blame him. Her own heart contracted with his desperate rage at this rejection. Several times she had tried to get Ken to change his mind, but these conversations too were truncated. Even more difficult than the monosyllable was the swift exit from the room, the swift walk down the hall, the finality of his closing door.

More and more now she felt not only isolation and sadness about Ken but a lively anger. His decision to stay away in June was a turning point he doubtless had tried to escape, one he might feel guilty for reaching. But reach it he had, and nothing could make her accept it, though she admitted that if he were there, tense and largely silent, it might be worse than having him not there at all.

By the third of May, when Dr. Dudley’s monthly bill arrived, she looked at it in a sudden energy of resentment. He too was always silent; he too acted as if she had no need, no right to know about Jeff’s progress. Not once since her single trip to his office last fall had she seen or heard from Dr. Dudley. He had not once telephoned; he had not once written a line. The only link between them was the typed bill which arrived on the third day of every month, unvarying except that most of the time it said, “Eight office visits, Jeff … $280,” while at other times it changed to, “Nine office visits, Jeff … $315.”

She had taken her cue from him for the full year, writing out the check herself at home from the checkbook she kept there, not from the master checkbook she kept at the office, to which Gail had daily access. And she would herself mail back the check to Dr. Dudley, also without a personal line, also in the same “no comment” manner. Suddenly it seemed false, loathsome.

She twirled a sheet of note paper into her portable typewriter.

Dear Dr. Dudley,

I will be coming up for Jeff’s graduation. Might it be possible to see you then for an hour, as a scheduled visit? Recently I told my husband that Jeff will be continuing the analysis next fall, and it disturbed him very much. I am worried about the summer, with Jeff at home, which is why I seek counsel from you that might help make things easier for him and the family as a whole. You will, I am sure, know how deeply I’d like to have whatever word you might find it appropriate to offer, as Jeff’s first year with you comes to an end.

Thank you in advance.

Yours sincerely,

Theresa Lynn

With commendable promptness his reply arrived three days later, and as she tore open the envelope, its brevity told her that it contained denial.

My dear Mrs. Lynn,

I am sorry, but for the present any further meeting between us would not be in Jeff’s best interests. I hope you will accept my judgment on this point.

Yours,

James H. Dudley

She did accept it. There was nothing to do but accept it. There was never anything to do but accept it, accept what Dr. Dudley handed out, what Ken handed out, what Jeff handed out. Or what each kept to himself.

Had she been so secretive when she was eighteen, as willing to let her mother stew in the hot juice of worry month after month, with never a word from her to ease or cushion her uncertainty? She could not believe it. Doubtless she too had done things that seemed distant and callous to her parents, but she did not believe that if there had been anything of this size or weight, she would have shut out her own mother or father so implacably.

Back then there were no cliché jokes about “Jewish mothers” and it had never occurred to her to ignore or wisecrack about her mother’s concern. At college nearly thirty years ago, the darkest secret that might have arisen was that she was pregnant; she could well imagine not wanting to tell that at all, but once she had told her mother, then she would not have followed up by a cool silence month after month.

And if she had discovered that she was lesbian? Even the supposition came as an impossible shock, but in the same instant of shock she knew that if she had discovered such a thing about herself, she could never have told her mother at all. She would have been unable to give her such pain.

Why had Jeff been able to? It was the first time the thought had ever struck her, but now it hit hard. Why? Really why? Most boys would have hidden it forever, or at least as long as they could keep on hiding it. She had reacted so completely to Jeff’s telling it, had admired him so for his young courage. Was it courage, just courage, unadorned and bright? Or was it, in fact, in some dark subterranean way, his own need to stun her, to punish her? Homosexuals disliked women, were even repelled by women, sometimes hated them. Did Jeff hate her? Even not recognizing his own feeling, did he unconsciously want to avoid her, to destroy her because she was a woman?

Never before had this possibility occurred to her, but there it was, sudden, vicious, more monstrous than she could have imagined. Yet within this harrowing hypothesis, so much of his behavior these last months took on a new rationale. His bursts of irritation, his willingness to keep her guessing, his purity of silence about the analysis and any progress away from homosexuality back toward the normal—if he did hate her, his behavior suddenly became explicable. Hideous but explicable. Down there in those subsurface levels of his being that he was now exploring for the first time, perhaps this suffering of hers gratified some obscure and unsuspected need in him.

He cannot help it, she thought, not any of it. Whatever the reasons, he’s going through such hell himself it’s all he can do to get through himself. He can’t even consider what it means to a father or mother.

That story about the wicked prince—suddenly she was hearing it again, as if she were again a little girl of six or seven, sitting there in their big living room up in Pelham, listening to her mother telling the story about the cruel princess and the wicked prince. Her brother Will already knew the story by heart, but he listened to it all over again; it was a favorite with him, a kind of horror story that had an irresistible power to enthrall him.

“This handsome wicked prince,” her mother’s long-ago voice was saying, “was terribly in love with the beautiful cruel princess, who kept taunting him and putting him off. She swore she would never marry him, but nothing would stop him from desiring her for his wedded wife. At last, one day the princess said, ‘If you really want my hand in marriage, then cut your mother’s heart out and place it on a silver tray, and bring the tray to me.
Then
I will let you wed me.’

“The wicked prince lamented and wept, but at last he did as the princess had bade him do. Then, as he was carrying his mother’s heart through the forest on the silver tray, he stumbled over the protruding roots of a great tree. And as he stumbled and fell, his mother’s voice spoke to him from the silver tray. ‘Did you hurt yourself, my son?’

“That’s the kind of mother I will never be,” her own mother had ended the story, looking straight at her and then at her brother Will. “I’ll love both of you all my life, but if you hurt me and wound me and do cruel things, I won’t be the sappy fool who keeps on loving you and forgiving you and treating you as if my love was yours no matter what.”

“Of course not, Mommy,” she had cried in a fearful tingle of excitement.

“Of course not,” Will had echoed her.

Years later, when her own son Don was about six or seven, she had told him the story one day, and he too had echoed that same passionate “Of course not.” “Oh no, never,” Margie had whispered when her turn came. “Gee, Mama, you never would,” Jeff had said seven or eight years later on.

Always she had thought she never would. Love was a round, a giving and taking and giving, a loving and being loved and loving, endlessly progressing, endlessly assured and assuring and assured again. Tiffs and quarrels mattered little, but if ever there came a supine willingness to accept maltreatment, then loving was degraded into a kind of spineless collusion.

And yet here she was.